Chatter, Silence and Focus
by Our lives are full of chatter, full of the noise of human voices, a constant chattering that not only comes from all around us, but that emanates from within our own heads.
“Nothing at all,” he answered.
“Then, Blessed One, what good is it?” he was asked.
To which he replied, “Let me tell you what I have lost in meditation: sickness, depression, anger, insecurity, the burden of old age and the fear of death. That is the good of meditation, which leads to Nirvana (freedom from selfish and useless desires).”
She went on to quote the Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius:
“Are you distracted by outward cares? Then allow yourself a space of quiet, wherein you can add to your knowledge of the Good and learn to curb your restlessness. Many of the anxieties that harass you are superfluous: being but creatures of your own fancy, you can rid yourself of them and expand into an ampler region, letting your thought sweep over the entire universe.”
James Moffatt, an American educationist and writer, saw writing as an essentially meditative activity, as did Julia Cameron. In “The Artist”s Way”, Cameron encouraged writers to spend half an hour each morning writing what she calls “morning pages”. She sees it as a way of de-cluttering your mind: you simply write what is going on in your head, you write about the events and people and emotions things in your life your mind that are occupying your mind.
There’s a function built-in in many computers: it’s called Defrag – defragmentalisation. Apparently the initial storage system in computers is not all that well organised; when we add stuff to the memory, the computer simply puts it in whatever space happens to be available. It looks organised to us because it’s organised into folders; but it’s actually all over the place – especially if we’ve had several sessions of work on that particular document. The defrag function reorganises the memory fragments; it’s puts together the bits that are inter-related. As a result, it can find stuff more quickly.
There’s one school of thought that sees dreams as having the same basic function in our minds. Put another way, our dreams are a sign that the mind is in operation, defragmentalising itself.
Morning pages fulfil the same sort of function; they help still the chattering mind, they settle us down, they create the quiet space from which we write. When the mad monkey mind is chattering away, it’s very hard to focus, to get into flow.
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