Life is a series of Distractions

 

He feared that life was merely a series of distractions and not the contiguous thing that he and the rest of the people he knew were trying to make it. This seemed particularly acute today, with the variety of ways that a person could go about without ever paying any attention to his own life, to his thoughts and feelings. Perhaps all these distractions were mere trifles—idle splashing at the top of the river, or perhaps they were indicative of humanities thoughts and feelings. It seemed, if the data was to be believed, both recently and throughout time, that mankind really was a bit of a petty creature grasping about for straws or gold or land or language or women. 

The idea that people should be engaged in some sort of authentic internal discourse was a bias in and of itself. Who is to say that the Roman soldier at the outpost of Gaul did not spend the day musing about his wife, or a woman’s white leg he’d seen passing in the street market, or his riches. Who’s to say that he was any more present to his life than we are now? Eastern cultures have been engaged in the practice of living intentionally for nearly two thousand years. Perhaps the natural expression of man was distraction. And, the deification of focus was the real problem. It was the focused men and women who moved the chain forward, built towns and skyscrapers, made banks and space crafts, rockets and the IMF. Perhaps the problem wasn’t a problem at all but a sort of coping mechanism. A default setting that allowed people to go about in the world without doing too much harm.

 It was an American President, no doubt a focused and driven man, who perpetuated a massacre from above in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on all those unsuspecting people below, going on about their idle and trifling days, buying food in the market, peddling across town, hanging clothes on wash lines, flirting with a girl, and then, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Of course, the alternative could reasonably be true as well. The Buddhists were well known for their love of peace and solitude. Perhaps all this distraction was not just one of the baser developments or manifestations of the human spirit. It might be reasonable to conclude that peace and solitude, presence to life, to each moment, to the leaves crunching under your feet, the soft trill of a bird, the motor on a passing car, your breath expanding and contracting, would be enough to bring you into some sort of community with yourself that would allow you to expand outward in peace. 

The thing to conclude, he thought, as he walked down a winding street filled with blinding sun light, was that distraction had always been a part of human nature, and the real question was what a person would do with it.