In Defense of Distraction

I recently took a book outside, setting up in a shaded chaise lounger with a cup of coffee. The sun was out. It was going to get hot, but would be pleasant for a couple hours yet, especially with the gentle breeze. The mocking birds were talking, creatively mixing their trills and titters. My wife would be with her girlfriend for the next few hours and no other person was in sight. It was, in short, a perfect set up for a morning with a novel. And this was one I was particularly eager to read, the fifth book in Doris Lessing's Children of Violence pentalogy.

As I settled in, before I could even open the book, a dragon fly buzzed me. It hovered before my eyes, its teal and pearly flanks iridescent, set off by veins of pure black, veins that became thin and intricate as they continued into otherwise transparent wings. I noticed that out over the lawn there were dozens more of the species patrolling the area. My insect friend had not come alone. The typical dragon fly only lives for a couple weeks, a bit to trivia I'd kept stored away for just this moment. Later I would look it up, to be certain. (As it turns out the life of an individual dragon fly can range from one to eight weeks.) Such a short life, yet long enough to be born, to feast, to procreate, and to die. 

With a start, I realized that my book was on my lap, unopened. Okay, now for reading. I was a couple paragraphs in, when a squabble erupted in the tree overhead. The mocking birds' song was now a kind of shriek, an alarm, as a pair of them shot from the branches to intercept a crow that was flying past, an innocent passerby mistaken for a nest raider. The crow, much bigger than its attackers, nevertheless took evasive action, diving, circling, flipping onto its back to show sharp talons, while the smaller birds drove it onward and away, chasing it to anywhere but this place. It was a kind of epic battle, fought out against the background of our local mountain, now orange and purple in the rising sun.

The mountains here are protectors. At least that's how they struck me as my attention shifted to their flanks. I was reminded of an idiom I learned from the writer Rebecca Solnit, "(T)he mountain is beautiful in the distance, but steep when you're on it." I was reminded of the idea that if a mountain peak represents human goals, the slopes represent life itself. The life-and-death dance of the birds had, in the meantime ended, as I refocused on the pages of my book, 600 to go, a steep climb before I reached the peak, which would be the end of a reading experience of several months. I flipped to the end of the book to see that my goal was page 612. And then I'd be no where.

Okay, now I read, I told myself, but not before taking a sip of coffee. As I did, a rough gray-brown rabbit emerged from a hedge across the way, followed by a baby, then another. I let the coffee, which was no longer quite hot enough, rest on my tongue, robust, nutty, bitter, before swallowing. The baby bunnies made me scan the sky for birds of prey. Only a few days ago, I'd seen a hawk carry off a ground squirrel. There are so many rabbits around here, of course, almost too many. Bobcats, coyotes, and owls have all been seen hunting in the area, doing what comes naturally to them, while incidentally preventing the rabbit population from overwhelming us. Although it's impossible to not feel sympathy for individual bunnies, like the ones who live in the hedge across the way, it's likewise impossible to not find a kind of peace, which is to say acceptance, in the way nature tends toward balance.

My book rested heavily on my lap. I took it in two hands and began to read, telling myself that now I would concentrate, focus, put my nose to the grindstone. Martha, the protagonist, was making a study of an ancient hunk of wood that had been fished from the muck at the bottom of the Thames River in London, probably a vestige of some long lost ship, that had for a time been part of a stairway prior to the second World War, but was now, more stone that wood, being used as a gate post for protective fencing bearing skull-and-crossbones signs, encircling a bombed out building. Meanwhile she was thinking about the places she needed to be, the things she needed to do, the people with whom she needed to consult. I continued reading the words, but my mind was busy considering a teak sculpture that I once saw daily, and that I thought was stone for the longest time. I caught myself reading without comprehension, backtracked, and re-read. There are curricula that purport to teach children how to read like this, without requiring comprehension, but rather drilling kids on phonics, on sounding out random words as they stand alone; they read sections of books, but not the whole thing; I once heard about a class reading To Kill a Mockingbird, but not all the way to the end. To do it this way is to strip writing of meaning, which is to strip it of interest, as if the mountain peak can exist without its flanks, making reading into a rote task and no one likes rote tasks. What a cold, harsh lesson about reading.

It would be a miracle if any child, taught to read this way, would choose, on a sunny morning to carry a book outside . . . But I'd not read more than a couple pages. 

A "V" of Canada geese flew overhead, squawking. The smell of a neighbor's bacon and egg breakfast curled under my nose. Some doves had joined the mocking birds in song. Yellow butterflies had supplanted the dragon flies over the lawn. And the mountain, beautiful and steep, was now bright in the full sun. The book felt good in my hands, solid, the words on the page taking me from this century back into the last one, into the mind of a young woman from South Africa, a post-war woman on the streets of London being distracted by a hunk of old wood that appeared like even older stone.

In the previous book in the series, Lessing wrote, "The big city's not been with us long enough to be important, we are already beyond it. Because now we think: that star over there, that star's got a different time scale from us. We are born under that star and make love under it and put our children to sleep under it and are buried under it. The elm tree is out of date, it's had its day. Now we try all the time, day and night to understand: that star has a different time scale, we are like midges compared to the star."

Far overhead, a jet was painting a trail of frozen water vapor in the brilliant blue sky from west to east, carrying passengers back because east is the direction of back in this country, just as west is out, south is down, and north is up, points on the map and in the story we tell of how the world goes together.

I'd not given up on reading, but the distractions of the morning were doing their jobs. We say that we live in the age of distraction, but we have always lived in an age of distraction. Seneca the Younger, the ancient Roman philosopher complained, "A multitude of books distracts the mind." Descarte, Mark Twain, John Locke, Telsa, all of them complained of distractions. The challenge of self-important educators throughout history has been how to compel the attention of their students. These teachers are forever trying to force children to focus, to concentrate, which is to say, block out the here and now in order to one day be able to do or know or believe . . . something. They take away their smartphones, they hush the room, they close the doors, they make rules about when the children may eat or urinate or sing or ruminate on the connections between themselves and the world around them. Sometimes this is even enforced with shame and punishment. 

Yet, the children, in being distracted, are only doing what nature has designed them to do. This is how the human brain has evolved: for a world of distraction. That distraction is a bane, is a product of the myth of the mountain peak, the fairy tale of goals and destinations. Reality tells us over and over again to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, to pause on the steep slopes, to experience what is real and who we are in that reality. It's not an accident that what neuroscientists call our "window of consciousness" can only remain open, on average, for about seven seconds. We are not evolved to think in straight lines, and we are especially not evolved for spending our youth attending to the trivia that bossy adults set before us as summits we must attain lest we be labeled failures.

By the time the day grew too hot to continue sitting outside I had managed to read most of a chapter. That was enough. There is no hurry to finish a book, any book, especially when there was so much else to feed the mind, heart, and soul. The only insects out now where pesky flies. The birds had fallen silent. The rabbits were hidden in the shade. My coffee was the temperature of the air. And the mountain still embraced all of us, beautiful and steep. And far above everything was that star, invisible now behind the brightness of the star we call our own, somewhere along its dragonfly journey of birth, feast, procreation, and death: beautiful, steep, present, not a distraction at all, but rather the only thing there is, life itself.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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