This weekend I was out camping in the Catskills with my friend Mikey. I set an intention to think about concentration. I wanted to come up with more specific exercises to use with high school age kids to work on their concentration muscles. We live in an age of A.D.D. and medication, shortened attention spans and quick fixes. One can actually feel a sensation of pain/discomfort when one tries to concentrate beyond one's typical threshold. Difficult feelings emerge. It is important to have techniques for dealing with the process of stretching the attention chords, and building the concentration muscles. In order to do well on a big test like the SAT, one must be able to slow down and concentrate. This is not a small task, however, because so many things can get in the way.
One thing nature does, it offers such an infinite amount of stimulus, so many things to look at, to hear, smell, touch, that one is quickly overwhelmed. It is amazing that I can feel calmer in the city (which has a reputation for chaos) and then I can drive out to the Catskills, and sit there in my chair in total silence and feel crazy in my head. It really bothered me that I couldn't enjoy the "peacefulness" of nature. But, I know one thing. It takes time, my friends. Time. So I knew. I said to myself:
"Drew, it is perfectly okay that you are sitting here in beautiful nature and you are not enjoying it."
I knew that what I had to do was to just sit there and to cease to attack myself for feeling the way I did. You know what I mean? What good is it to get upset with myself for feeling upset? So I just sat there and accepted whatever was happening.
When I first went to live on a Kibbutz in Israel over ten years ago (yes it is true, I did!), I remember I went crazy for the first two weeks. I knew that my stay was planned for at least six months (I ended up staying for 10 months), and already at two weeks I was jumping out of my skull with boredom. There was nothing to do. I'd wake up at dawn, go to work in one of my various outdoor jobs, finish by 2 or 3PM and have the entire rest of the afternoon and evening off. What was I supposed to do with all this time? I was so painfully aware of TIME, I was drowning in it.
But then, something happened. I don't even remember how it happened or when exactly. I only know that somewhere inside of me, my metabolism started to slow down. I started to somehow match the rhythms of the world around me. Kibbutz life is so much slower than U.S. life, particularly in the city, but really almost anywhere in the U.S. On a kibbutz, if you are walking and suddenly you decide to stop for a moment and just look around, or gaze at at tree, or watch an ant carrying a piece of food, this is accepted behavior. In NYC, however, you have to fight to achieve this quality of slowed rhythm. The city is just too frenzied to encourage that kind of attention.
On the kibbutz, after I had that "click" and slowed down to the pace of the life around me, I found a whole new world open up to me. I could write and write about this new world, but let's suffice it to say (for now) that it is out there, waiting to be witnessed at every moment.
Back in the Catskills, sitting there in my cheap canvas chair from Target, surrounded by the amazing natural world, I began to mellow out. I felt my breath slowing down. I felt the chaos of my thoughts relaxing their hold on me. Slowly, as if I was coming out of a stupor, I began to look around me and to see things. I began to actually see things as if for the very first time.
And then, later, after spending the night sleeping outdoors under the stars, I was awakened by the sounds of birds chirping. My eyes still closed with sleep, I listened in to the birds. I'd heard chirping before, but this time I really found that I was listening. It was a more active process. I could hear the birds talking back and forth, back and forth. First one would chirp in a particular pitch three times, and then the other would respond with two chirps in a different pitch. Then the first would reply with three chirps again. And then the second would respond with four chirps. And so on and so forth. The birds were talking! And I was listening! At last, I was concentrating!
Drew
