On Seeing (The Power of Awareness, Focus and Choice)
Attention. Where is your attention right now? Are you aware?
Perhaps your attention is drifting in an ocean of thought. Thoughts about what someone said or how a driver just cut you off. Maybe you are lost in thoughts about your upcoming vacation, or what you’re going to have for dinner tonight.
Most of the time our attention is captured by things that we do not choose.
Yet our attention is all we have. What we focus on shapes our experience. It shapes the color of our emotions and the way we see the world.
We have all had the experience of reading an entire page of a book and having no idea what we just read. Our attention wandered and we missed it. We got into a car to drive, and on arrival, realized that we don’t remember the trip.
Our body was going through the motions but our mind was elsewhere. Where is this elsewhere? Can we touch it like we can touch the hands of our loved ones? Or is it a shadow in our mind? A symphony of images and words that have no material reality?
Wandering thoughts are natural, of course. They allow us to make plans for the future and to reflect upon the past. The trouble lies in not knowing that we are thinking. We get lost in a daydream and we are completely out of touch with our life in the present.
To reflect on the past is necessary. We must do this to learn from our mistakes and our triumphs. Learn what worked and what didn’t. In this way, we can create a vision for the future that is compelling and motivates us to move forward and grow. Staying stuck in the past, is useless. It binds us to a world of past mistakes and regret. In the same way, we can easily get stuck in imaginations of the future. That “someday” we imagine will come. When we finally make that move we have been wanting to make, ya know, “just have to wait for the right time.”
The images in our head, at every moment, are representations of reality, and often poor ones. They are not reality. We look at others and see an image in our head of them. We see how they affect us and what they mean to us. We don’t see them. We experience events and see our internal representations of them, not the objective truth.
How is it that two people can look at the same thing and see two different things?
One person goes into the forest and sees that the other half our lungs are there, in the trees. They are providing our precious oxygen, and he feels grateful. Another sees a waste of land, that should be cleared and turned into a shopping mall. We see what we value in every situation, our minds color every experience.
“External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.”
In our martial arts training, we bring our focus into the present moment. We come into contact with our body and temporarily step out of our heads to feel where we actually are. We step onto the mat and leave the problems behind for a time.
This allows us to remove ourselves from the patterns of thought and rumination and to see our problems from a fresh perspective. Sometimes we will leave training so physically exhausted that we realize the ridiculousness of what we were concerned with.
Taking on the challenge of martial arts, helps us realize that we are stronger than we thought. We discover a new confidence in our ability to handle tough situations. When we’ve done those last few push-ups we didn’t think we could do or mastered a challenging technique, we feel a sense of inner strength. Each day that we stoke the inner fire is a day we are better than we were yesterday. This process of growth is never ending, and that’s the beauty of it.
Perhaps next time we are bothered by something that happens in our lives, we can take a step back and focus on what we are grateful for, on what is going right in our life. We can feel the breath in our lungs and remember that some are breathing their last. We can look at our health and our family and realize how fortunate we are. Maybe that will calm some of that anger we feel toward a bad driver.
This moment IS our life. There is no other. When the future comes, it will still be NOW. Our mind is the one thing we carry into each new moment. We should be mindful of how we use it.
- Sean Gary