When’s the last time you saw a movie in a theater? Gathered freely with friends? Went shopping for clothes? (And I don’t mean at a place where you get free shipping on returns.) I haven’t been roller skating in over a year. Yes, I said roller skating. I used to take my kids every Saturday morning. It was a little slice of heaven.
The landscape of our lives has changed. Molehills have become mountains. And there are gaping holes where various forms of entertainment once stood. An entire economy has emerged from stay-at-home orders. If you had bought stock in Amazon and Netflix a year ago, you could probably retire right now.
And your attention is at the center of this economy. Everyone is fighting for it. When Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, was asked about his greatest competitor, he didn’t say cable TV or Disney+ or YouTube. He said sleep. Think about that. There’s a reason the next episode starts streaming automatically. The goal is to eliminate what Adam Alter calls “stopping cues” -- transitions where your attention can shift gears. And if the memes are any indication, Hastings has succeeded.
Don’t get me wrong -- 23 minutes of Schitts Creek at the end of the day is a nice way to unwind. What I’m saying is that cultivating our attention in healthy ways has become even more important during COVID. As screens have moved to center stage in our lives, we might have to insert our own stopping cues.
Maybe we need to let our minds wander more, or even be bored (GASP!). There’s some evidence, after all, that boredom is actually good for you. It sort of depends on what happens when you’re bored. If you tend toward rumination -- chewing up old grievances or going over everything you could have done better or should have said -- then boredom probably isn’t your best option. But if your mind just wanders -- like a daydream -- then it actually leads to enhanced creativity. You’re familiar with the old trope about having great ideas in the shower, right?
This is especially true for kids, who -- when not having every hour of their day programmed -- actually create their own forms of play and let their imagination take over. I’ve seen it again and again with our five-year-old daughter. We finish something, she looks eagerly to us for what’s next, we flail for options, she slumps away in a fit of despair, then spontaneously breaks into song and starts playing with her imaginary babies. Seriously, this happens.
Not everyone, of course, has the blessing of being bored. Certain professions, including many essential workers, have been forced to work far more than usual during this time. And for those of us who have kids learning at home, especially the working moms who tend to be the primary caretakers, the pandemic has been a crisis on many levels. So boredom is a luxury. Not everyone can afford it right now. All the more reason to savor it when you get it.
So the next time you get itchy and let your finger endlessly swipe, maybe you could just take that time to disconnect from the over-stimulation that seems to define our days. Maybe you could give yourself a stopping cue and tune into the sounds around you.
Once you move into it, this space to just be in the world is a gift. Maybe you’ll notice the sound of snow melting, or a cloud in the shape of a blue whale, or a flag fluttering in the wind, or the tiredness in your children’s voices at the end of the day. What you notice doesn’t really matter. What matters is giving yourself a break from the demands of daily life, and allowing yourself to savor those moments when life pulls open the dome to reveal a plate full of the blessedly mundane moment.
Let’s do that now with a guided practice.
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