1, #86 - How to survive in a world of distraction
On attention cottages — Estimated Read Time: 55 seconds.
How do we survive in a world of distraction? This week, I read an interesting take:
“What I need, what I am trying to build, is — I coin this phrase by analogy to a memory palace — an attention cottage. … When I sit down in a chair with a book in my lap, a notebook at my side, and no screens within reach or sight, I am dwelling in my attention cottage.
The great artists and thinkers cultivate a systolic/diastolic rhythm, tension and release, an increase and then decrease of pressure. In the latter phase they withdraw, by whatever means available to them, to their attentional cottage for refreshment and clarification — and then they can return to the pressures of the moment more effectively, and in ways non-destructive to them and to others.
But most of us, I think, get the rhythm wrong: we spend the great majority of our time in systolic mode — contracted, tensed — and only rarely enter the relaxed diastolic phase. Or, to change the metaphor: We think we should be living in the chaotic, cacophanous megalopolis and retreat to our cottage only in desperate circumstances. But the reverse is true: our attention cottage should be our home, our secure base, the place from which we set out on our adventures in contemporaneity and to which we always make our nostos.”
Insight from Alan Jacobs in his essay, the attention cottage. Thanks to
for sharing it in his incredible newsletter, Moonlights.