Belly Button Lint

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Tag: attention

  • Theme:

    Cyclic waves of stress

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    1–2 minutes

    Cycles of stress present themselves as waves in which we must surf rather than be pulled under.

    Judging the swell of the peaking bundle of energetic stressors determines if they are personal, interpersonal, corporate, or global anxiety. Discernment requires a paradoxical release: holistic subjectivity is available only when you release intellectualization.

    The right brain feels and gauges, recognizing patterns, while the left focuses, which blots out the ability for meta-awareness. To cope with stressors, you must release to acknowledge the wave you must ride.

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    Overload cycles

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    1–2 minutes

    When we are content and peaceful we begin looking for an additional challenge: some tension, hopefully, constructive and growth-oriented.

    We take on the challenge and become stressed, this is when things start to break in our lives.

    How we handle ourselves during these moments is vital, because being under stress creates a narrow focus of our attention, which leans towards analytical efficiency and rationality, not towards empathy.

    Understanding and witnessing this cycle allows us to keep from overreacting, which prevents us from having to clean up a mess we made with apologies and self-recrimination. The trick is to ride the highs of overload without creating the inverse lows.

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    happiness comes from reality

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    1–2 minutes

    You can try to be happy by keeping your head in the sand. That is, to live in escapism, often taking the form of idealism.

    However, reality will slap you on the ass, and once again your happiness will be stolen from you.

    The other approach is clear eyed bravery: to see reality as it is, or at least as much as you can understand. This is not being a cynical realist; it is seeing through your own illusions and delusions.

    Once you can see through yourself, you can see through anybody – and not being tricked, you can love them; then you will never not be happy.

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    Melancholy as fixation

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    1–2 minutes

    Melancholy is being in love with your pain.

    What this looks like is a paralyzed state of holding onto the past: repeating the wanting for a relationship (or a time) that shifted. This plays out as a compulsive reenactment of the past, replaying the pattern, clinging to and controlling the uncontrollable through re-narrating. It becomes a favorite story, a mantra.

    To be fixated (unwaveringly focused) on pain is a recipe for insanity: sad or zealous, it narrows you out of wider awareness. It is more akin to suicidal self-hypnosis: replay your favorite movie until death.

    In part from Julian de Medeiros

  • Theme:

    good manners

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    1–2 minutes

    Good manners aren’t about your performance; it is about being accommodating, gracious, and a little bit blind and a little bit distracted when somebody else’s performance falters.
    Allowing somebody to maintain their dignity is akin to forgiveness: an ultimate kindness and kinship.

    This implies that "bad manners" draw attention to another’s failures; it is marking them down and loudly keeping score.

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    forgiving our projected pain

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    1–2 minutes

    While we find it relatively easy to forgive others, it is more difficult to forgive ourselves.

    We feel wounded and blame our internal pain on another, which justifies lashing out. Yet, as Anthony DeMello, Alfred Adler, and Victor Frankl reveal, you have chosen to be hurt and hold onto your pain.

    This is why you can forgive them easier than yourself: they did not cause the pain as much as you held onto it and weaponized it.

    The focus of your rage is merely a proxy projection for your internal disgruntlement. The trick of forgiving yourself is now doubly tricky because you allowed yourself to treat someone else poorly: to forgive yourself after lashing out is to accept your monstrosity.

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    thoughts can self-liberate

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    1–2 minutes

    We empower our thoughts by focusing on them: by battling them, by pondering them.

    By refusing to pay attention to them, they dissipate; they self-liberate.

    Consider thoughts a byproduct of living that we manufacture, like methane or carbon dioxide. When we keep it inside, inside our brain in a little cage made of attention, we never let the idea release. These thoughts then agitate and drive us.

    It is not that thoughts themself are poisonous or toxic; it is our attentional focus that retains them until they replace silence and cloud our desires that harms us.

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    Performing Masculinity

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    1–2 minutes

    Masculinity has become excessive and performative. To be “masculine” is to be in drag, commanding attention through a ritualized, traditional set of affectations.

    This only occurs when there is no place for actual masculinity: there is no longer anything for masculinity to do.

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    Trivial repetition as antidote

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    1–2 minutes

    Much of our life is trivial, banal, and absurd. To give it meaning, we focus on something particular and drive it forward.

    The temptation will be to do something grand: become a Mozart or Michelangelo. However, if most of life is trivial, you could choose to excel at the trivial.

    Bypassing society’s heroic values through excellently boring repetition would allow you to find an acute (and more accurate) sense of who you are in relation to the world, sans manipulation.

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    To become stable alone you first need community

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    1–2 minutes

    To grow into the ideal state of autonomy (the robust individual), you must first participate in an ecology of growth and attentiveness.
    You must first build the strength and skill to remain independent later.