In my current setting this is unsettling and raises many questions. To focus is to choose. But, if you have made up your choice you are not exploring other things which means you may not have made the right choice. The context is not buying a shampoo because that is where the paradox of choice comes in and people spend hours online without deciding, the context is life decisions.
For most part - deadline pushes you to make a choice, a college admission deadline makes us decide the college which our children go to. What if we do not have a deadline, will we go on trying new things or will we exhaust and choose ?
For many who are lucky, serendipity plays a big role, being in the right place at the right time can make the choice for you and those who are unlucky, mother nature, or a decision made somewhere in the echelons of corporate makes the choice for you.
Some really don’t care.
This is what Jiddu Krishnamurthy has to say on attention “As we said, we ought to consider what it means to be attentive. This may be the clue to a harmonious existence. As things are, the intellect, the whole activity of the brain, which is thinking, dominates our existence. This brings about contradiction, peculiar behavior in us. When only one part of our whole being is dominant, it will inevitably bring about neurotic behavior. Attention is awareness of this dominance of intellect without acting on the instinctive urge to control it or to allow emotion to take its place. This awareness brings about subtlety, clarity of mind.
There is a difference between concentration and attention. Concentration is to bring all your energy to focus on a particular point. In attention there is no point of focus. We are very familiar with one and not with the other. When you pay attention to your body, the body becomes quiet, has its own discipline; it is relaxed but not slack and it has the energy of harmony. When there is attention there is no contradiction and therefore no conflict.”
I agonized over these lines yesterday so could not finish my post. K does that to me (and many of us) always. It’s his way of pushing you to find your own meaning. Some one had commented that he is harsh / rough and difficult to understand whereas Si Sri is much softer / easy - because he gives you an answer, K does not.
Focus / Concentration is what I (many of us) do when I go to work.I focus completely on getting to the office, doing my meetings with all sincerity, completing my work and coming back - the dominant role is played by intellect or thinking.
Attention is when I am cooking or running. Yes both of them have a goal but there is harmony in the head - heart and hand / legs when I am doing it and my attention is complete - all your senses are alive - I smell the food, taste the food, see that it looks beautiful.
Circling back to my original question? Why is a break year (or a longish break) so crucial ?
When we work our mind gets hardwired to focus and it’s difficult to get away from that circle. It’s embedded deep, even when u take a break - the pre break work / prep and the low of coming back and the stress of the pending work sucks you back with double focus. This is a pattern. Just like a circadian rhythm, this is a pattern which all of us fall into. Many people love it and they should enjoy it as long as it lasts. See TED talk: Danger of a single story (link below).
A similar story plays out after 12th, when we were looking for admissions for Joyee most of her batch mates children had a vague notion of what they want to do - one of the best things which I saw when the new set of colleges - Ashoka, Kriya & Plaksha who understand this and give complete flexibility to students in choosing the subject. They can choose the subjects, do projects, have a mentor who will guide the child on the projects and counsel her on what the application of what they are learning and the future may hold for them. It’s expensive and extends the study period but it sets the direction clear.
Coming back to ME - it has been 2 months and I am still learning to defocus and just experience activities so I write a lot, shoot photographs (put out the story it whispers in my mind), cook, walk, run, travel, listen to long podcasts which dwell deep into the life of a person. I recently joined a painting class - to build my attention. I am still learning.
It takes time.
Focus is great. Attention is Bliss.
Postscript:
Read the full note on awareness by Jiddu Krishnamurthy here: https://jkrishnamurti.org/content/chapter-41-awareness-brings-about-subtley-clarity-mind
See this TED talk ‘Danger of a single story’ by one of my favorite authors: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en
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