Rapt

Rapt

I've never met most of you. I'm guessing that if I had this
pleasure chances are good you'd tell me you're "busy, busy, busy" or
some variant thereof. Today most people do. And most people feel
stressed, overextended, unable to do the things that make their hearts
sing and spend time with the people they love the most.
Recently I had the pleasure of meeting an Amish farm family:
mother, father, and seven beautiful children. By any accounts they
were busy: crops, animals, crafting furniture to sell, food
preserving and preparing, housekeeping... But they were not frantic.
They were living mindfully. They were connecting instead of flying
past each other. You just knew that they would sit at table together
for supper without being nagged.
So why, of these two groups, do the ones who are the
beneficiaries of labor saving devices feel the most exhausted and
frazzled? Is this the cost of living in our modern age? More to the
point, is this the inevitable cost?In her book Rapt: Attention and
the Focused Life, a must read for all who feel trapped in a rat race,
Winifred Gallagher answers with a resounding no. A near tragic event
in her life brought her an epiphany. "Walking away from the hospital
after the biopsy from Hell--not just cancer, but a particularly nasty,
fairly advanced kind--I had an intuition of a highly unusual blue-
white clarity. This disease wanted to monopolize my attention, but as
much as possible, I would focus on my life instead." YOWZA!
Attention is the key. Just in going through the activities of
daily living you are constantly bombarded by more stimuli than your
brain can possibly take in and process. Think of this as the
psychological equivalent of having just a little money and a lot of
things to spend it on. We've all been there, haven't we? With both
money and attention you can either squander or spend wisely.
Attention can be captured in a bottom up, stimulus driven way.
Hearing an ambulance siren while driving, you'll pull over to the side
of the road. Conversely, top-down attention is self-directed
focussing. The night before shopping day the hubby studies the sales
brochures for money saving coupons on things he plans to buy. We have
a lot more control over this than most of us imagine. Rapt gives us
the key to achieving this control, to going from a stimulus driven,
pulled in too many directions, frenzied existence to a mindful, even
rapt, life.
Gallagher starts with the basics of the two way interactions
between focus and feelings and focus and environmental input. She
shows that nature and nurture both play roles in shaping our unique
ways of deploying and sustaining attention. She applies her insights
into the worlds of relationships and work. She discusses the threats
to mindfulness posed by modern technology and disputes the commonly
accepted verities that multi tasking is good and that daydreaming is
detrimental.
This is not one of the annoying, preachy, my-way-or-the-highway
volumes that talks down to us and promises happy ever after in
exchange for strict adherence. Gallagher knows each of us will attend
to it through the unique lens of personal experience and state of mind
and heart. What she would like to provide us with is a chance for
epiphany without the stimulus of crisis. "After running that tough
experiment, however, I'll choose my targets with care--writing a book
or making a stew, visiting a friend or looking out a window--then give
them my rapt attention. In short, I'll live the focused life, because
that's it's the best kind there is."
It's the life I want? Isn't it the life you deserve. If you're
frazzled and harried with no end in sight this insightful book may be
the key to unlocking your cage.
On a personal note, I savored this book, taking about a week to read
it. There was so much to think about in each chapter. It was the
mental equivalent of a humungous cheesecake. I so want a lifestyle
for us all that keeps technology in it's (servant) useful place and
allows us to live humanely and mindfully.
A great big shout out goes out to Gallagher for sharing with us her
hard won wisdom.
Julia Emily Hathaway



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