Beyond The Distraction Discourse

As we find ourselves somehow in the peculiar admixture of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, what would have been the seventy-ninth birthday of David Lynch, and the second inaugural of Mine Furor, one thing from the first reign of the latter that I did not miss already has returned: what I’ve decided to term the Distraction Discourse.

You know the drill. Various people of more or less equal stature in intelligence, insight, morality, and reach warn against paying too much attention to something at the expense of attention paid to something more important. None of them, however, necessarily agree with each other as to what’s the distraction and what isn’t, yet they all are equally judgmental as they chastise people who in their estimation are getting it wrong.

Since there is a complete lack of consensus as to what’s a distraction and what isn’t, this only amounts to more time spent fighting each other instead of fighting the enemy.

Here’s what I’m hoping for myself. I do not prescribe it, only offer it.

I’m hoping to pay more attention to that which energizes me and less on that which enervates me. That which enlarges me rather than diminishes me—a vantage point I’d once lifted from Winnie:

When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness. I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking, “Will this make me happy?”, but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?”

When I say that something enlarges you or diminishes you, this “you” includes your sense of who and what matters to you outside of yourself. This doesn’t mean paying no attention to that which diminishes you and what’s important to you. It just means not paying undue attention to it, where “undue” means the point at which paying that attention enervates rather than energizes you.

Only you can decide where these lines lay, because only you know yourself. The competing thresholds of energization and enervation is a quintessential “your mileage may vary” situation.

For me, this means that I hope I don’t share the outrages or the dangers of the day or of the moment just because they are flooding the zone with shit, but only because and only when and only in the context of someone or someones actually doing something about it or organizing to do so. To feed as little anger or anguish as possible absent some clear action to use that anger or anguish to do something about it.

The shit, be it distraction or not, and by whatever metric or analysis you use to determine that difference, is going to reach you no matter what.

My job, I believe, is to understand as deeply as I can what enlarges me and what diminishes me (and the things that matter to me), and to know and respect my own thresholds of what energizes me and what enervates me. That’s the only way I can even hope to have the capacity to help foster that which enlarges us and foil that which diminishes us.