Thinking and reading about distractions, whether or not they are good or bad. When someone talks about technology (i.e. mobile phones), distraction is bad. Yet when someone talks about creativity, a certain amount of distraction is good. Or at least, it is s sign that you are not ready to commit yourself to the thing in front of you quite yet,. perhaps because it has not been subconsciously worked out.
I like this excerpt very much:
“I’m writing this sentence as a distraction from a book about poetry that I’m meant to be writing, but also with a hunch that the book may get written via the distraction, that something in the book needs to get worked out — or worked through — by my not attending to it. Or perhaps the book was really always a distraction, and wherever the non-book resides is the place I’m supposed to be. “I like to put things up around my bed all the time,” Diane Arbus once noted,
pictures of mine that I like and other things and I change it every month or so. There’s some funny subliminal thing that happens. It isn’t just looking at it. It’s looking at it when you’re not looking at it. It really begins to act on you in a funny way.
“That’s a dream — or daydream — of the tangential as a route to the heedlessly thoughtful, which is a dream I want to have.”
The difference, perhaps, is that when talking of technological distractions, we see little added value in them. the tools we have created to be addictive turned out to be addictive, and addictive things typically do not offer us more value than the addiction itself. So the distractions of technology are a means to their own end, and offer little added value. We have a feeling instead that they are distracting us from something more important.
The distractions of the mind when it is trying to be creative, or working out a problem, or avoiding working out a problem are different. Too often these technological distractions come into play (remember, they are built to be addictive) and we feel as though we have wasted our attention. Perhaps there too, the mind is not quite ready to give its attention.
Perhaps we are slowly breaking our ability to be attentive, though, and that might be another matter entirely.