The Future

X: The Future
Today it’s dead in here, which I didn’t expect. I thought all these artists would be habitating their habitats, eating and chatting and playing cards or whatever. But all except one are out. I guess I’d better take advantage of this quiet time to get something done.

Except that a gust of wind just blew the side door all the way open and threw a blast of dirt and dust into my eyes.

How do I come up with a personal distraction management plan? I don’t even know where to begin. Is it even possible to have a plan? Choosing which stimuli to limit, which to ignore, and which to absorb. Or maybe it needs to be more macro than that.

During a brief period when there’s nobody in here but me, I have a sudden urge to pick up one of the books or magazines stacked on my desk and peruse something. It hadn’t even occurred to me that these piles of printed matter would be a distraction. But with nothing else to focus on while I ponder my plan, they’re suddenly calling out to me with their beguiling titles and cover lines.

Just as weirdly, now that people are wandering in again, the urge to look at my books has disappeared. The slow, meandering movement of bodies through this space seems to serve the same purpose for me as that tree blowing in the wind outside. Both make it easy for me to sit comfortably within my own thoughts for long periods of time. Maybe I need to set my writing desk next to a window.

My mom came in. Although this is the quietest day yet, her visit was nearly the biggest interruption I’ve had so far. She walked here from her apartment and wandered around making remarks of utter delight at all the little habitats, eventually declaring the whole thing “cute.” Then she sat down and chatted nonstop for about ten minutes, during which time I simply could not bring myself to be rude and ignore her. Plus, I was so thrilled she came that I couldn’t bear to do something that would send her away. I ended up loaning her five dollars to buy some flavored water at Smith’s on her way home. Then just as she was leaving Emily showed up, so I introduced them, since they’ve never met. And then I felt like I should talk to Emily for a minute before she went to look around. It’s the obligation involved, usually, that turns a distraction into an interruption.

“Keep going,” Nick C just said as he walked by. I had been completely spacing out, turning over the idea of this distraction management plan.

Anderson concluded his article with the idea that maybe the human mind is plastic enough to more fully harness our newly abundant array of distractions. The state of the world as it is now might give an advantage to people with ADHD, or anyone who can easily bounce from subject to subject. What’s more, it might push these brains to develop their natural tendencies into newly useful skills. “Kids growing up now,” he argued, “might have an associative genius we don’t—a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new.”

But how, I wonder, can anyone see the connections between these infinite points if they never have the opportunity to stand back from it all and see how it fits together? Shallow engagement has a way of keeping you too close to the details to get that macroscopic view that you need for creative thought. Or conversely, it keeps you too far away to understand your subject well enough to do anything meaningful with what you see. His final statement just reads like a flight of fancy. “They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Maybe, in flights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zenlike state of focused distraction.”

It’s likely there’s truth in the idea that in training the mind to better jump from topic to topic, the world as it now exists will produce in its newest generation people who can put things together in ways that will stagger us. People who have never read Moby-Dick, most likely, but who can succeed at mental feats we have yet to imagine. But focused distraction? I’m more likely to believe that becoming more skilled at choosing how to function in various circumstances—when to engage deeply, when to engage shallowly, and when to disengage—will be the biggest advantage for a 21st-century mind. What if the brain can learn to master both focusing deeply and bouncing erratically, without suffering the loss of one function in the process of developing the other? What if the brain can have better control over when it does which?

Then we’d have some kind of superhero who could write a novel in the middle of traffic, in between bouts of tweeting particularly poetic sentences and following a play-by-play feed from the Lakers vs. Celtics game. Someone who’d write when she wanted to write and tweeted when she wanted to tweet and followed the game when she wanted to or blocked it out when she didn’t. Someone who could pull all those pieces together into a coherent and surprisingly beautiful whole of the sort we’ve never witnessed.

Maybe.

Or maybe someone could just set a desk down in the middle of a chaotic gallery space and take a long, hard look at the various kinds of distraction, and think about how she might harness the best of them while protecting herself from the worst. Maybe that would be the best distraction management plan anyone’s come up with yet.