Roar, page 9
TURBULENCE
The mind is like a turbulent river. Although it may have pure water, excessive whirlpools can make it look murky, but if we approach it with a glass, collect a small amount of its current, and set the glass down, we’ll soon see the opacity begin to decrease and much of its content will settle at the bottom. Breathing is like that crystal glass; it can still your mind to achieve peace.
Some believe that attention is nothing more than a gift, but I’m living proof that it’s a skill that can be developed. Certain meditation exercises can effectively calm the internal controls that cause us to get distracted.
When you try it, you’ll notice that meditating goes beyond just sitting down and closing your eyes. So, if you’ve never tried something like this before, start with simple exercises like the following one, but first check out these practical tips that you should keep in mind to get the best out of the exercise:
Choose a physical space conducive to this practice and, especially at the beginning, free of as many distracting elements as possible.
Find a comfortable position, but don’t let your body lean on anything because that could induce sleep. Do not lean your back on a chair, furniture, or any other type of support.
Keep your neck and back straight. To help you achieve this, imagine that you’re wearing a helmet which, in turn, is being lifted by an invisible rope pulling on your neck and spine.
Have an anchor to return to when your focus wanders. In this exercise’s case, it’s your breath.
Once you’re ready, close your eyes and start breathing. Choose the rhythm you’re comfortable with and start counting your breaths. You can count per breath cycle (in other words, each time you inhale, hold your breath, and exhale would be one cycle) or per action (count each time you inhale and each time you exhale). The first option is more measured and requires a little more attention. Focus all your attention on your breath count. When you reach ten, start again.
You’ll suddenly notice thoughts coming in to distract you from your breathing, and it won’t be as easy to keep count as described. However, breathing will help you settle the mental dust, and you will be able to hold your focus on a particular point for a longer period of time. Try focusing on the sensations of the breath in your body. For example, zero in on the movement it causes in the nostrils, on how the air enters the body cold when you inhale and exits warm when you exhale, or on the expansion and contraction of the chest or diaphragm. Choose one of these options and keep your attention fixed on that point without changing the rhythm of the count.
I WAS GOING TO TAKE A BREATH, BUT I TOOK FIVE.
As you practice this exercise, you’ll notice how many thoughts enter the count. At times, your focus will drift. Memories, doubts, thoughts will come to you…. Don’t be surprised if you lose count of your breaths. Those are the notifications that you can’t turn off, the ones that take you from the center to the periphery.
In more advanced stages, these exercises can start to become really complex, and those who engage in them reach states of absolute concentration that can last for hours. Right now, my intention isn’t to get you there, but to give you a technique that will improve your ability to focus on what’s important.
Many people who have difficulty staying on track find it hard to adopt these practices because they believe they’re inefficient for their short attention span. They may also feel that spending twenty minutes a day counting breaths will make them less productive. While it’s true that those minutes won’t provide you with immediate results, if you don’t look for ways to improve your attention, the amount of time you have is trivial. Even if you work twenty-four hours a day, that time won’t be fruitful if your mind doesn’t stop wandering.
When we feel anxious, our attention retreats to the mind, which is why we lose sight of other factors we should be focusing on. For example, when this happens to high-performance athletes, their mind tends to neglect certain key elements of the competition because they’re focused on “calming down.” They become so intent on achieving this goal that they neglect the competition’s conditions and their inner physical performance, both of which are needed to win.
There are too many temptations ready to distract us. To achieve success, we must prioritize tasks that improve our ability to spend more and better-quality time on the activities necessary to reach our goals. It’s not all about hard work. Attention is also needed to enjoy pleasurable moments, appreciate the arts and reading, reflect on our life events.
Enjoying beauty also requires focus. If we’re distracted and insist on seeing the world through a screen, we may not notice the beauty that surrounds us. It’s like the people who spend a lifetime dreaming of seeing their favorite artist in concert and spend the entire event taking selfies and posting videos on social media. Even to delight in love, enjoy love, and make love, we need to be inflamed with the unifying power of attention.
Attention is related not only to productivity, but also to what we choose to focus on and, consequently, what results we achieve. Some philosophical ideas are based on the concept that what we pay attention to is what we will find. This perspective makes sense beyond how esoteric it may sound. When we focus on certain aspects of our lives, it shows how much we value those areas and how much we prepare for them. But it’s mainly a response to how much we neglect to take care of other things. No matter how good we think we are at multitasking, mindfulness is a one-piece puzzle.
We spend so much time reading about other people’s lives, while others are writing our own. They’re busy doing their own thing and we’re busy focusing on them instead of ourselves. When will you take care of yourself? I thought you really wanted to make this happen. When you said you wouldn’t accept another day without giving it your all, I thought you weren’t just saying it with your mouth but with your guts and with the irrevocable conviction of surpassing yourself and everyone in front of you. Are you still making plans without including yourself in them? Are you still heaving a sigh but not feeling a single drop of sweat on your forehead? Maybe you’re just telling yourself you’ll do it, but in truth you don’t want that life you dream of and say you love so much. When someone loves something, they don’t let it go, they fight for it, search for it, seek it, protect it, and don’t let anyone take it away from them.
You and I must answer to ourselves. One day we will be held accountable in the eternal for what was given to us, for all that we received for free. And we will have to take into account what we are leaving on this Earth before we depart it, and what will be the return we will bring before the One who asked us to multiply rather than divide or subtract ourselves. I don’t want to miss out on anything in my life. I will not let anyone clip my wings, much less pluck them myself.
I NEED TO GET MY INNER CHILD ON A SWING.
Another issue that prevents us from focusing is our determination to become multitasking machines. This is a skill we hold in high regard and proudly list on our personal profiles, not realizing that it goes against our brain’s nature.
We all multitask, some more skillfully than others, of course. I can listen to the news while I check comments on my social media and write a few lines for my posts, all while eating breakfast.
This becomes more complex with tasks that require a higher level of concentration and mental agility. When we engage in several intellectual activities at once, including those that involve learning, our brain jumps back and forth from one to the other, but it’s always a step behind.
Let’s say you’re writing an email to a key customer. A good relationship with this person is vital to your department’s goals. You need to be careful with your words because the text of your email should come across as enthusiastic yet realistic. You need to pay attention to it. As you’re writing, your phone lights up to notify you that you’ve received a message from a person you’re interested in, and whom you don’t want to keep waiting. (Has that happened to you?)
If we were multitasking organisms, interruptions while writing an email would have no consequence on what we write. But the way our brains work causes our attention to shift from our email to the phone and vice versa. Each time you pivot your focus from one point to another, you’re one step behind where you were before because you have to remember how far you’ve gone and where you left off.
This reconfiguration happens in fractions of a second and will repeat itself with each and every distraction. You may not notice it, so you stand up triumphantly, thinking that you’re a total multitasker when in fact your process was inefficient.
The more stuff you do at the same time, the more time you waste. Short interruptions don’t improve performance. As a result, spending half an hour on TikTok is more efficient than going in and out of the application thirty times, because these repeated interruptions affect the possibility of finding focus. Human beings are not made to know what to do with the thousands of stimuli they receive today. In just thirty seconds of swiping through our social media, we can go from being moved by a video of a kitten to feeling distressed by a car crash or turned on by a sensual dance; all without discerning, understanding, much less assimilating it. It’s a roller coaster of emotions that overwhelms and drowns us. The techniques we’ve discussed establish clearly delineated periods of focusing and not focusing, reducing interruptions due to jumping between activities and making work time exclusive to one task. If you have any doubts, let me clear them up: Dedicate your working minutes to a specific function. If you have two goals, establish two specific time slots, one for each objective.
SMILING EYES ARE A MAGNET.
We already know that being focused is essential to igniting the roar within us. This is a crucial task in a world that devotes almost all its efforts to stealing some of our attention. You must exercise discipline until you meet your time blocks. Only then will you be able to move forward. Even paying attention to our rest time is a sign that we’re on the right track.
You might think that leisure has no place in a book that wants to exploit your full potential, but the opposite is true. Reflecting on what we can do with our free time is essential, and we’ll discuss that next.
THE LAZINESS SIN
One of the things I can boast about is the use I make of my laziness, that reviled joy from which I have reaped exuberant harvests. While I know the fruits of maintaining a strong willpower, there are moments when it seems impossible to recover from everyday efforts, even when we support ourselves with a healthy diet, adequate sleep, and physical activity. There are times when there is a general strike in our energy and vitality, and we feel out of sync. What is usually relatively easy for us to do becomes an unbearable burden. There are feelings that seem to surpass physical fatigue—I’m talking about a disturbance that settles within us like small traps undermining us from the depths of our being.
There are times when we are inexplicably drained, when we wake up with absolutely no energy. We glide from the bed to the bathroom, from the bathroom to the car, from the car to the office, and we don’t know how the hell we managed to get home without having fallen asleep during the day. We also can’t figure out why we were so tired in the first place, but the exhaustion is so great that the last thing we want to do is to think.
Although it’s a natural, perfectly biological response, when we need to take a break, we think that giving in is reprehensible. We were taught that feeling lazy opens the door to hell. This is not a recent description. One of the most memorable scenes in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is his account of the hardships suffered by the idle on the fourth terrace of Purgatory, that place infested with fast-walking souls who feel the urge to make up for the idleness that robbed them of the opportunity to do right. I remember that in this description, these souls were haunted by the what-if shadow and no longer had time to feel or speak. It was a terrible place where unfinished business enslaved us with its reproaches.
In the opinion dictatorship, a large number of influencers attack rest as the worst of vices. They condemn laziness with their posts published shamelessly from some Caribbean beach. Slavers justified their barbarism with the excuse that hard work would improve the health of those they saw as nothing more than merchandise.
I assume you still remember your mother holding your hand when you saw a beggar and using them as an example of what happens to lazy people. Maybe she even gave you a lecture: “That’s how you’ll end up if you don’t study.” “That’s what will happen to you if you don’t do your homework.” As if that person’s unfortunate outcome didn’t involve multiple factors. We’ve been conditioned to feel bad when we aren’t being productive, and we don’t always know how to silence that elf who mocks us while we fall apart. We want to find a way to keep it at bay, but our laziness is so great that we’ve negatively altered all our duties. For some reason, we tend to assume that people in the most miserable conditions are lazy. But few lives require a greater degree of occupation than those who must compensate for oppressive adversities.
IN THESE TIMES OF WAR AND HATRED, MY MOTHER’S ARMS ARE MY TRENCH.
We want to clear our minds, but laziness kills all our endorphins. The body doesn’t obey, the mind is tired, and although we do nothing, we are unable to relax. We remember that at some point we were prepared to face conflicts and activities, but lately the energy and physiological bills are so high, we can’t afford them.
In a world moving at a speed that makes us retch, it’s essential to embrace the subtlety of doing nothing. I receive the most hurtful criticisms when I post a photo of me contemplating the shoreline or enjoying a cigar; it’s a constant barrage of criticisms condemning “my laziness,” without knowing how I got there. As usual, there’s always someone who insists that taking a break or enjoying the moment are actions that are contrary to the teachings of God. They have not yet understood that the Bible must be read, but it must also be lived.
According to an article I recently read, the University of Nevada estimated that distractions caused by mobile apps resulted in an $85 billion loss to the economy. The couple of minutes we spend looking at our phones during work is known as “cyber laziness.” But here’s a thought: How much would it cost the economy if workers didn’t take a couple of minutes off?
While it is costly for people to check their Facebook feed during their coffee break, what would be the price of not being able to do so? These interruptions, if done in moderation as recommended by focus exercises, could actually have an impact on increasing productivity. Pressure and excess are a burden even for those trained in strenuous activities. In the past Olympic Games, several well-known athletes succumbed to the weight of emotions and demands. Diatribes erupted on social media about whether they were allowed to do this, which only added fuel to the fire.
Baseball has had cases of players who lost the ability to throw the ball because of emotional crises. Many therapists have practices full of people suffering from professional burnout, which is marked by somatic and psychological ailments related to the natural pressures of the job, from the workload and the managerial demands to interpersonal relationships.
Some people always work hard and are bursting with energy but this is largely due to the vibe created by elements that give meaning to their work, which we will explore in depth in Step Three when we discuss the concept of purpose.
I LIKE MY MIND WHEN IT IS UNOCCUPIED.
I recently went on stage in Washington, DC, and gave a lecture of more than three hours, then repeated the effort for five consecutive days in five different cities, covering 2,500 miles. Wake up, travel for hours, go on stage, take care of the people who want to talk to me. Repeat. They are exhausting days that I manage to enjoy as if I were on vacation, largely because I enjoy the support of a close-knit team and the ever-restorative company of my wife.
Many forms of laziness are harmful, but some are necessary. When you don’t have the breaks that allow you to recharge yourself emotionally, it’s likely you’re doing something wrong. If your resting process causes you to feel guilty and makes you more distressed because you’re not moving forward with pending issues, then even if you’re not doing anything, you’re not resting either. You’re simply running away.
After accumulating so many tensions, emotions, and thoughts, we can’t cope because our vital engines are overheated. Discovering the source of all these harmful emotions and the why of the unconscious tendency to let them pile up will be part of the healing of this wound that looks like laziness. The hard truth in our self-evaluation will lead us to decipher the emotional problem that is hiding behind this strange fatigue and the flood of thoughts that drown us.
DYNAMIC LAZINESS
Without a doubt, too much inaction won’t allow us to achieve our goals, but physical, intellectual, and emotional burnout will also eventually cause us to expel our preserved air.
Fighting our emotional stress and learning how to transform it into serenity, peace, joy, and optimism requires a careful cleansing of the mind, which paradoxically demands an enormous amount of energy that we don’t have at times, so it’s important to find ways to recharge. For instance, I’ve combined my recharging moments with an endless source of energy: my imagination.
We might think that our imagination can wear us down, but in my case, it replenishes me with power. An unbridled imagination has become my weapon against the laziness that eats away at me. Dreaming without rules, where no one can interrupt me, has helped me reach the most forgotten places of my person.
When I can’t take it anymore, I retreat to a place where I can drop my body and let it be. I don’t try to force it to do anything, I simply put my hands in my lap, close my eyes, breathe deeply, and begin to see everything my mind suggests to me. Even if I’m flooded with a thousand ideas, I just let them flow. And if one of them excites me, I hold it like a small thread that I begin to pull with the intention of seeing where it takes me. I let myself be carried away by what its colors make me feel, by whether I’m cold or hot, by the fabulous creatures that populate the forests of my mind.
