Rapti Siriwardane – A book review for Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher (2010), March 30, 2020
Despite everything, we all exist in cones of privilege, in our own insular ways.
I designed 2020 as my Decade of Depth. In a world, academic or otherwise, patterned by the desire to amass, as opposed to expand. Arguably, at its worst, ours is a world of the personality cult, in accumulating a litany of accolades, publications, grant funds, students, ideas. This declaration felt like a soothing balm to the slow-burn of scatteredness and depletion.
Over the last decade, much has been writing in praise of deep work, to invoke Jay Papasan, Cal Newport, and Greg McKeown with their own diverse takes.
In my mind´s eye, it conjures the following: plenty of focused light streaming in from a glass pane; the steady glow of a table spotlight on a wintry evening. The steady concentration in a closed or open space encrusted in silence, sans white noise. Or better still that Shambhala of single-pointed focus, the splinters of banished acts of multi-tasking at your feet. And folds and folds of time, to arise, to daydream, detour, to entertain and to craft tangential ideas that are brought back to drawing board, before they become the very seeds that are laid out to germinate in the sun.
It often surprises me how much time and effort is peeled into ruminating about time management, as opposed to how you redirect your attention, trim away those excesses of thought. In watered-down contemporary mindfulness parlance, it might be metaphorically referred to as “taming the monkey mind.”
Time like money, is an emotionally loaded subject.
It even seems a tad bizarre when you imagine time being spoken of as a resource that could ideally be owned and possessed. Ironically, many of us are all too aware of how time can be snatched away or stolen, and that often comes with the consequence of feeling emptied – in mind, body, and creative spirit. In times like these, I have come to appreciate how irretrievably twinned the stages of creative energy and expansive time are.
Yet, there have been moments, snatches of unfelt time that have borne witness to a certain kind of enmeshment, a state of near enchantment that draws you into an almost muscular tapestry in which I imagine and write, chisel, and re-imagine, as the hours fold into each other. While some people claim to manage their time meaningfully, it comes as little surprise that few can manage their attention as well. Attention overwhelms and underwhelms.
Therefore, work like Winifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, are often downplayed at the expense of seemingly more hands-on, practical titles.
As Gallagher, writes, “paying rapt attention [..] increases your capacity for concentration, expands your inner boundaries, and lifts your spirits, but more important, it simply makes you feel that life is worth living… In short, to enjoy the kind of experience you want rather than enduring the kind that you feel stuck with , you have to take charge of your attention.”
This sensibility goes beyond mindfulness and single-pointed focus. In sum, honing your capacity to influence your attentive patterns (than the contents of your attention itself) will make you more creative, kinder, productive, and happier.
“As to the theory that what you focus on creates your experience and that choosing those targets wisely is the key to the good life, Csikszentmihalyi simply says, “Yes, absolutely.’“
Truth be told, the volume is quite boring and dry in many parts, but overall, it is worth reading. While it’s not overly entertaining, it is still practical, not unlike Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit (2012).
What makes this particularly useful is the fact that differentiates between different kinds of attention, across the different elements of our life such as relationships, creativity, making decisions etc. It does come with tactical titbits on enhancing and enriching focus, even for those who feel they singular live in their heads and would like to pay more attention to the world around them. Gallagher pays as much attention to strengthening your instinctive capacity in managing attention first, before its deepening or its redirection.
We suggest to skip the first three chapters because they are boring and self-evident. The real meat in the book comes after that.
The book is divided into 14 chapters and an Afterword. A few of those that resonated were Focus Interruptus and Disordered Attention, chapters 10 and 11 respectively.
Perhaps as a species, we were born to focus, muses Gallagher.