Quote roundup #10: On returning to depth of thought and emotion
To go deep, we must remove ourselves from the distractions surrounding us.
The Book Club for Busy Readers
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be hosting a monthly virtual book club for all of my Substack subscribers, starting in January. Generally, these will be held on the second Sunday of every month (unless otherwise noted) from 2-3:30 PM Eastern via Zoom. In two cases, I have authors who will make a guest appearance to discuss their book with us. If you are interested in joining, I will need you to send an email (jeannie [dot] ewing 07 [at] gmail [dot] com—without spaces), so that I can extend the Zoom invitation month to month.
Click here for more information:
I first stumbled upon mindful techniques—though I didn’t have language for it then—when Sarah was about two weeks old.
Once settled back at home after a harrowing twenty-six hour labor, emergency cesarean, and shocking news of her craniofacial diagnosis, I wept. Freely. Often. In private.
I also raged at a God I thought I knew, the one I was taught brought goodness and healing rather than the one who permitted devastation and destruction. My questions became fanatical ruminations:
Will Sarah live, or die?
If she dies, will it be in her sleep, like some of the other babies with Apert? Will it be during a high-risk surgery? Will it be from an invisible, undiagnosed problem, like silent seizures?
If she lives, what will the quality of her life look like? What will building that life require of her, of me? What sacrifices will we have to make—financially, with our time, from our current relationships?
What will this do to Felicity long-term? Will she need counseling—when will she need counseling? How can I explain this to her?
Why do I feel like I am dying, too?
Panic rose in my chest, filling the cavities of my lungs with the waters of suffocation. I was drowning in my anxiety, in the clutch of desiring certainty where none could be provided.
It was impossible for me to dwell inside Mystery, whatever that meant. Mystery was too abstract, too enigmatic, too evasive. Mystery was a specter, translucent and coy. I could chase it, but I could never capture it.
And so.
One day, as I composted these questions, rotating their stench in my thoughts again and again, it occurred to me that I could no longer live this way—that this was, in fact, no way to live at all.
I was perched on an upholstered chair gifted to me by my late maternal grandfather, cream-colored fabric peppered with olive-green ferns. My hands rested atop each armrest, my body sunken in the cavern of cushions. Streams of afternoon sunbeams highlighted my stationary setting, its warm afterglow caressing my right cheek. I could not muster the energy to move, or to alter my cognition, or to even attempt to try.
My reality had become crisis management, hustling from one diagnostic appointment to the next, Sarah in tow. Sarah was the focal point of my existence now, but the burden of leaving Felicity behind never failed to appear during my daily cogitations. In my slumped position, my brain shut down all conscious musings, perhaps as a coping mechanism, perhaps to demonstrate how weary and worn I truly had become.
And just when thoughts dissolved into oblivion, a sweet, melodic chirp caught my attention. It was a songbird outside the window—which type I couldn’t tell in that state of mind—but I tuned my ear to its timber. It was soft, resonant, innocent. The bird sang as if it were its first time belting out its tune. And who knows—maybe it was. But this became my grounding point, something simple that drew me outside of myself for a short bit, just long enough for me to notice and remember that goodness and beauty still existed in the world. And maybe I could access it more often.
This was the beginning of my daily practice of noticing things again, attuning my inner ear to the wonder of small and delightful pleasures.
For this year’s final Quote Roundup, I am reflecting upon the concept of attention—what it means, its importance in our frenzied culture, and how we can return to a state of centered being in the midst of turmoil, strife, and suffering. My commentary is based on four quotes from a book I read years ago by Maggie Jackson called Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Let’s begin.
Attention is an organ system, akin to our respiratory or circulatory systems…Attention…is the brain’s conductor, leading the orchestration of our minds.1
I have been stuck in my head all day again. I can’t seem to escape the gnawing sensation that I have to remain vigilant, because some new expectation will be handed to me this afternoon. Will it be a randomly assigned task from Ben? A teacher emailing me that my first grader has a multi-step project due at the end of the week? One of my parents telling me they can’t pick up Auggie from preschool?
No. Stop, I tell myself. Listen.
I lend my right ear to the open window in my home office. Crickets chatter in unison, in a rhythmic cadence. There are no cars whirring past our home on this busy intersection of our neighborhood. For now, the relative silence and music of nature become my focus.
It occurs to me that I can’t pay attention to anything when I am wallowing in worry—which I do often. Daily, if I admit it. Yet what I notice outside myself blessedly distracts me from the litany of administrative tasks piling up in my thoughts. The crickets become a coat I slip into when I need to escape from the maddening and crippling anxiety that intends to rob me of the precious commodity of time.
If only I can train myself toward this practice of The Pause and listen, then perhaps what is still and solitary—the rustling of maple leaves in late summer, the drifting bumblebee—might well become my life’s mentor.
Attention helps us understand and make sense of the world and is crucial as a first step to creating memory.2
In this moment, I remember:
my childhood barn cat, a calico I named Muffin, leaving a lizard she sliced in half sizzling in midday Kentucky heat on our asphalt driveway. I was about three.
accompanying my mom to the local Amish produce stand, where she bought flats of in-season strawberries and crisp green beans. My brother David and I would form an assembly line, one of us washing and the other of us snapping or chopping, while my mom prepared the produce for deep freezing. I was around nine.
Sunday afternoons spent at my paternal grandmother’s house in rural northwest Ohio. Leisurely and laidback, we chatted as a family while her television blared local programming that irritated me while I sketched animals on my drawing pad. I was maybe eleven.
the purchase of my ten-speed bicycle—a hot pink Schwinn I had eyed for weeks while window shopping in our neighborhood. My dad told me, “If you can earn the money to pay half, I will pay the other half.” When we walked into the store and handed the clerk my hundred-and-some-odd dollars, I beamed. This was around age twelve.
sitting at my grandpa’s bedside while he lay dying, my belly swollen from second-trimester pregnancy. He drifted in and out of consciousness and could no longer speak, but I leaned over the nursing home bed and spoke clearly, “Grandpa, it’s Jeannie. I’m here and I won’t leave you.” He squeezed my hand in acknowledgment, and it was the last form of communication between us. Grandpa didn’t want to die alone, and I intended to give him the comfort of knowing he wouldn’t. I was almost thirty.
What’s the value of memory? I think about monumental milestones in my history, like particular holidays when multiple family members were present, and, with equal parts fascination and bewilderment, I marvel at the different aspects of that shared story from each person. It’s as if every individual present holds a different puzzle piece, and when we gather to reminisce, we put them together to form the broader image of what really happened.
I learned in college that every human stores aspects of an experience in long-term memory, based on whatever impacted them the most or serves as a lesson or cautionary tale. No one remembers anything with precision. But the purpose of memory seems to be a framework for creating connections from the past to the present day. It’s how we make sense of our experiences, of our life.3
Maybe this is why losing one’s memory feels akin to losing one’s identity—because without the images and screenshots of a life lived, we have no reference for who we are or where we’ve been or what we’ve learned along the way. In that regard, memory cannot be assigned qualitative value, measured, or replaced.
A society defined by movement, not settlement, does not prize permanence.4
I am a frequent flier at our local Fresh Thyme market and have patronized the store biweekly, like clockwork, for over seven years: same location, same day of the week, same time. There are two older women who serve as cashiers, Patty and Sally, and I’ve gotten to know them fairly well over the years. We chat about their grandkids, they ask me how old my boys are. In recent months, Patty opened up to me about her son’s newfound sobriety and the celebration of their reunited relationship. Sally shared that she lost her mother-in-law and showed me a recent photograph, recounting stories of her musical gifts.
These women are the only two workers in the entire store who have stayed over time, and I appreciate that, because permanence—or semi-permanence—breeds familiarity, comfort. It provides a structure for building lasting relationships.
I can’t tell you the rapid turnover for the medical specialists who have worked with Sarah throughout the years. In the beginning, Ben and I established rapport, then trust, among the skilled surgeons and therapists who worked with Sarah. We could do this, because there was longevity within the systems and offices where Sarah was a patient.
But now, I am accustomed to hearing after only a few months, “I regret to inform you that I will no longer be in this position after this date…” My heart subsequently feels anchored to the ocean floor. It’s not that I expect people to remain employed in a position or within a company that no longer serves them well; I understand the need to move on or move up. What disheartens me is the constant rearranging, the starting over again and again with new faces and names and personalities.
It’s common sense that meaningful connections take time to grow and must be nurtured over time. But that seems to be dwindling in this day and age. I can’t help but smile, though, when I recall the incredible people we’ve met who boosted Sarah’s confidence by increasing her range of motion or surgically giving her operable fingers. They became more than professionals doing their job; they became friends, even family. And now they’re gone.
Wisdom is not fed upon a diet of distraction.5
To me, there are both healthy and unhealthy distractions.
In my introduction to this article, I shared about the welcome reprieve of turning off the worry-tape in my head and tuning in to the songbird chirping outside my window. This, of course, was distracting me. But was it bad or wrong? No, not at all. It was a mental and spiritual break in what burdened me. It was a practice of being present.
Dysfunctional distractions draw us away from, rather toward, our true selves. Things like mindless eating, addictive scrolling, bodily inertia, unexamined lives, excessive spending, ingesting or injecting harmful substances, neglect of self-care or self-compassion. There are many more examples I don’t need to list here. You likely have your own to add.
The point is, what type of distraction are we using to cope with life? Is it something that rejuvenates us, restores our sense of connection and well-being? Or is it something that depletes us, causes us to feel increasingly isolated and lonely?
Laughter and play and creative experimentation and taking a day to “do nothing” and reading for an hour and sitting in the sun or shade and watching your kids or pets frolic—these are good for us, nourishing. They are the sustenace that feeds our souls, so that we can resume the necessary drudgery of everyday life that often bogs us down.
Fuel the good distractions, and you will find powerful insights surface in your awareness. The art of paying attention leads us to greater fulfillment and deeper wisdom.
Jackson, Maggie. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention And the Coming Dark Age (Prometheus, 2008), 14.
Ibid, 94.
See https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/how-memory-works
Ibid, 111.
Ibid, 260.