"I see the point of too many things"
Can we have too many interests?
A while ago I wrote about discovering that I was a geographer: “One of the things I loved immediately when I discovered Geography was that we got to learn about many different topics: we didn’t have to decide! … It was the interconnection between things that we got to focus on, rather than a deep dive into one thing.”
That eclectic—ohh look, another shiny thing over there, maybe I should try that pretty embroidery pattern, what’s for dinner tonight—flitting habit persists. Honestly, as I was typing the previous sentence, I stopped to take a sip of tea, looked out the window at my neighbours garden and started wondering how could I get our buddleia bush to grow like theirs, so nice and neat in a container and was about to get up and then...WAIT! STOP! Get back to what you were doing, I reminded myself.
ANYWAY, as I was aiming to tell you (!), I was skimming through one of my favourite Substack reads today, and this quotation jumped out at me:
“I don’t have a particular favourite ‘style’, that’s part of what I love about decoration, it’s the mix that excites me. Putting the unexpected together. If it’s all of one period or aesthetic I find it a bit dull! I do admire people who can do this and stick to it, but it’s not for me! The trouble is… I see the point of too many things.”
- Lucinda Chambers, co-founder of Collagerie, and Colville from an interview with Kate Watson-Smyth, excerpted from Kate’s Substack, Mad About the House, one of my favourite and most useful Substack reads.
So, not just me then! My ‘problem’ is that I get distracted by so much more than geographically-related landscapes and travel and people. I also love interior design and colour and patterns and ALL THE PRETTY THINGS: fluffy throws, woven table runners, intricate ceramic patterns on plates and tiles, floral wallpaper, heritage rugs and jewel-toned glass. Oh my indeed! And let’s not even get started on all the lovely soft Fair Isle sweaters, leopard-print shoes and cashmere wraps that are flitting through my Instagram feed. Gah!
Sometimes I freeze with a kind of ecstasy and rapture at all the beauty in the world when I try to take it all in. Did you see the movie Contact starring Jodie Foster? There’s a scene after she has rocketed into space when she exclaims: “Some celestial event. No... no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should've sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful... I had no idea.”1
I feel like that ^^. Just pure awe.
Of course I am not saying that enjoying beauty is a problem: it the opposite of a problem. However, I can get distracted by so many lovely things that I have trouble maintaining my focus.
I see the point of too many things.
As writers we are encouraged to notice things, to pay attention, to give our all to observation. Which is wonderful, and a practice I work on all the time, but noticing doesn’t always help me settle and focus on one thing at a time.
So my discovery that writing during the London Writers Salon Writers Hour, a one hour focused session each weekday, has helped me develop a TINY smidgeon of focus has been a huge relief. I show up for a one hour session five days a week, and have now even committed to a second hour in the afternoon until the end of the year to focus on another project.
By showing up and writing, and only writing, for that one hour a day, I have found a way to focus again. Once I got in the habit, it became something to look forward to. And the relevant bonus: for that one hour, I still my mind, pay attention to only one thing (usually) and put words on a page.
Confession: Sometimes I have to bribe myself to sit still that hour by promising myself a walk afterwards, or a snack, or a short burst of Instagram scrolling. Today, I have to post this before I can watch a presentation by one of my writing teachers. But whatever it takes is fine with me.
More delightful, perhaps, is realising that even at my older age, I am still learning new tricks. Perhaps these tools are the secret to channelling my geographer’s magpie brain to focus more like an owl. :)
Do any of you have a similar problem of settling down to just do the thing? How do you trick yourself encourage yourself to focus? Or is it not a problem? What are your favourite distractions? I’d love to hear! Still learning here, don’t forget!
Thanks again for reading friends! See you next week, which will be October! 🍁🎃🍁
xoxo Sabrina
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https://www.moviequotes.com/quote/some-celestial-event-no-no-words-no-words-to/
Constantly diverted. It's what gets my step count up as I divert from one thing to another. And while it might take longer to complete a task, just think of what creative delights have lit the path along the way.
Substack is a debatable point. In the beginning, showing up with a completed piece every week was such good discipline after I'd finished writing another novel a couple of years ago. I actually thought I might leave writing there - done! After Covid, my view on what was left of my own personal life had changed.
But no, there were more book ideas in my head. I just needed the discipline. However, over time, Substack is demanding more and more of my reading and writing time, so must be controlled so that I can get back to being what I set out to be 14 books ago - a novelist. That's a hard thing to do.
In any case, back to diversion - a birthday cake to make, but oh wait, I need castor sugar from the village shop so maybe the dog and I can walk the beach on the way. Oh, 18 degrees - where's my favourite polo shirt? Gosh, the pink one's got a mark on it, laundry. Might as well put the washing on. But just half an hour to read emails first... You get the drift.
The small and diverse things of beauty that tend to capture your attention remind me of the bower birds of north Queensland, the males of which assemble colorful and shiny objects, such as flowers and lost jewelry and bits of plastic, into small piles to attract mates. That is a good thing to appreciate beauty in many small things. Perhaps as "boomers" we have a unique perspective on the apparent, modern narrowing of our attention spans. I definitely noticed this trend in my students over the decades. Knowledge became increasingly bite-sized and internet-accessible, and the tendency of a student to plunge into a long or ambitious read to address a difficult topic—to work it through—increasingly rare. And I see that I too am quite vulnerable to this. In my case, deep book reading and bouts of writing, help to keep the sound bites at bay. Perhaps for you, your daily writing regimen may play a similar role. For this, I congratulate you!