A couple of months ago I was tripping about blithely with my gentleman friend in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn when the stream of conversation turned, as it invariably does, to the mental causality of the cruel mistress called Internet.  “You know,” I said, “the greatest and most popular mental health issue in the next ten years will be dealing with – ooh look at that pretty door! – distraction.”  “I think you’re right,” my gentleman friend graciously agreed, gripping my hand to prevent my collision with a careening unmarked van; “Pay attention Jonas!”

“Exactly,” I replied.

Sam Anderson takes on the D word in his New York Magazine cover story, “The Attention Crisis  – And Why Distraction May Actually Be Good for You” or as I like to call it “An Article That Requests To Be Discussed on a Buddhist Blog.” 

The eventual suggestion of the piece is that a dearth of focus may not be such a bad thing, and rather than being doomed, our 21st century brains will develop a different sort of plasticity for handling AND DOMINATING a world full of texts, tweets and chats and everything will continue as awesome if not awesome-er than before.

The piece, of course mentions Buddhism, meditation and mindfulness more than a few times, monks being the go-to poster children of focus.  There’s some interesting, discussion worthy points made by various experts, including the idea that experienced meditators are actually extraordinarily excellent multi-taskers.

I agree.  Anyone who has sat down to a decent meditation session knows that it is more like point-guarding a raucous basketball game than staring at a dot: you have to accept, receive and release every ricocheting thought that comes your way.  You have to step into the mental stream and go with the flow.  There are times when one wavers less – should they be surrounded by less stimuli in a retreat setting – but not wavering is not and cannot be the point.

For example: Here’s a completely rough thought sketch of a mere 30 seconds of my meditation this morning – a mediation session in which I was way more present than usual:

Breath. Belly. Concern about belly. Concern about concern about belly. Breath. Back. Breath. Shoulders. Breath. Mother. Breath. Coffee.  Boyfriend. Breath. Guilt. Breath. Breath. Breath. Self-congratulation. Breath. Dharma quotation. Wind. Inner Thigh Sinews.  Horn honk. Roommate.  Breath. Hearing. Breath. Anticipation of Contemplation. Boyfriend. Breath. Sex. Breath. Sex. Breath. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Therefore, one main disagreement I have with the article is that mindfulness is primarily presented as a synonym for focus, which is presented as single-pointed non-wavering absorption – a kind of narrowing and fixating.  Anderson sees this fixation as limiting and preclusive of creativity.

For sure.  Fixation is not mindfulness.  Fixation is the opposite of mindfulness.  If fixation shooes the stray thoughts away, mindfulness sees them, welcomes them and allows them to pass.  The teachings of the Buddha advise us to see a distracted mind as a distracted mind, a mind filled with anger as a mind filled with anger, a mind filled with lust as a mind filled with lust.  Not to rid or eradicate our minds of distraction, anger or lust.

Inevitably, the issue comes down to a misinterpretation of Proust.  Always!  Misinterpretations of Proust and mindfulness = my albatross.  Some people long for world peace: I long for a time when I don’t have to have one more argument about Buddhism and Proust.*

Anderson argues that in La Recherche du Temps Perdu, the infamous memory struck by Marcel’s tea-soaked Madeleine is a moment of un-mindfulness, or distraction, that prompts seven volumes of mindful creation. But in fact, the cognition of said memory is an example of mindfulness incarnate.   If Proust were not being mindful, if he were not paying attention, he would not see that memory pass through his brain.  The act of understanding and recognizing the mental flotsam and straws that visit our consciousness is the kind of paying attention that meditation, Buddhism and mindfulness request we undertake.

This is why our current relationship to all this information age stuff – not necessarily the stuff itself – strikes me as problematic.

Let us back up.  One of the more challenging-to-describe benefits of meditation is the ability to “see what is happening.”  (As in, see the distracted mind as a distracted mind).  Conceptually you think, “So what?  What does that do?  Why would ‘seeing what is happening’ make any difference?”  But what labeling is able to do is create space around and within mental experience.  It just does.  And that space around thought allows us, eventually, to make a choice.  It allows us to turn down the dial on compulsion and turn up the dial on deliberation.

And I know for myself that there is nothing like a day at my job spent distractedly clicking from website to website to squeeze that accommodating space from my brain – to deaden my understanding of my own thoughts so that even if I have a good idea for a line of dialogue or a story I don’t remember it.  The incredibly fast-paced flashes of information crowd choice and deliberation out of my mental process.  Surfing the internet may provide one with more highbrow information (and justification) than flipping channels, but the actual physical experience, to me, is exactly the same: depleting, enervating and nauseating.  Because far more often than deliberately choosing, temperately and moderately, which delightful websites to amuse, inform or delight me, I find myself compulsively reading half a post here, thinking about commenting, deciding against it, refreshing my email for the 100th time that day, reading half an article and wondering why I exist.  In the bad way.

And if conversations with everyone I know count for anything, we all have those days: those days when your brain feels like all it ate was Swedish Fish.  I don’t care about doom and gloom and The Way Things Are and describing generations and how we will evolve.  There is nothing inherently wrong with the internet or the glut of information.  But I think we often forget how to regulate ourselves in relationship to it and understand that the only way we can solve the problem is by paying personal attention to our experience and realize when we are using information in a healthy way and when we aren’t.  Oh and by the way – this is not about overcoming your own personal limitations so that you can become a superhero – because that’s a one way ticket straight back to the Valley of the Shadow of Viral Videos.  The distraction/attention debate is not about awakening our own inner baby Einstein.  Mindful information consumption is not so that we can be more successful or reexamine string theory or get a hotter body or a more meaningful experience – we should watch what we watch so that we can feel less stressed out and likely to puke on a daily basis.  It’s about happiness plain and simple, people.  Not productivity.  At ease, Horatio Alger.  Alors. 

Hey, we may very well all get to the point when it is natural for us to mindfully shift our attention to accommodate a rapid rate of consumption of information.  I think that some people are already more naturally fluid with a lightly shifting, mindful focus than others.  But we have a definite responsibility to meet the increase in distracting information with work toward developing mindful attention so we know when to hold, fold and walk away when our hippocampus is done.  Because when that unmarked van careening towards me eventually whacks my frame into the permanent quiet of peaceful oblivion, I pray that my final mental images will not include lolcats.

* I’m kidding.  I don’t have a lot of arguments about Proust.  And even when I do, I welcome them!  I think it would be awesome if I had more arguments about Proust than I had about whether it is ethical to watch David Hasselhoff eat a hamburger.   (It is not).