What I Know For Sure

Whatever you focus on expands.

I have no idea where I heard that phrase for the first time. Whatever the source, I can never forget it. It reverberates in me all the time, because I continually discover that it is true. If you are driving around looking for a mailbox in order to post a letter, suddenly you become aware of all the mailboxes on street corners that have been there forever. You’ve never seen them before because you never focused on them. Then, despite yourself, as if an imperative has been unleashed someplace deep inside you, pretty soon you cannot not see mailboxes everywhere. Try it. It’s like a gestalt switch with your normal reality. As another example, if you start playing around online with Google, you may suddenly look at your watch and discover three hours have gone by. One site leads to another, and then another, and down the rabbit hole you go. If you sit down to read a good book or do a puzzle in the late afternoon, you are gone from the world until you look up and see the moon peeping through the shutters.

I know all this, yet I must confess that I still don’t have faith in the process when it comes to my writing. I don’t quite trust what will happen if I just sit down and focus. It is too scary to believe that the process will work, so I will go to great lengths to distract myself, to hide, to procrastinate, to lose myself in the quiet comfort of the small details of domestic life: emptying the dishwasher, putting out the garbage, watering the plants, making a grocery list. It is as though these daily rituals will lull my vast anxieties and fears of incompetence to sleep so that finally I can sit down—and begin again.

What is that old Zen saying? Zen mind, beginner’s mind.

FragmentsSu T Fitterman