To whom do I report the theft...

December 2, 2020

To whom do I report the theft of my attention. I had it just a minute ago, and now I'm distracted. Maybe the newspaper stole it. With headlines of "Virus kills thousands per day." It could have happened when I was thinking about which podcast to listen to, which email to respond to, which blog to read. Perhaps the culprit was the National Republican Committee calling me to solicit my vote, or maybe it was the refrigerator, stocked full of goodies. Possibly it happened while on my walking.

Zivon, my super-smart Chocolate Lab, and I walked to the mailbox when we saw a truck pull over and stop ahead on the road, and a pretty young girl gets out. She scampered up the road embankment with a clipboard. Rachel, in her official white USDA Dodge Ram pickup, from the USDA, was here surveying the neighbor's Conservation Reserve Program land. She was checking to see if it is still qualified for government payment. We chatted a bit and discovered we have some mutual friends. She told me how frustrating her job assessing the land was. To qualify, a landowner only had to have the land covered in 50% perennial grasses. A piece of ground could be in terrible shape and still qualify to be in the program. Mildred's CRP land passes Rachel's tests.

My attention seems like it is being attacked like a beekeeper working an angry hive on a hot August afternoon. The attack stately is to overwhelm with thousands of tiny missiles of distraction. The precious resource of attention is being strip-mined to satisfy someone else's agenda. The only thing I think I control is my attention and where I put it. But assuming I have any control over my attention is a fallacy. Stuff just happens, and I can't explain why. I tell myself what I think are plausible reasons why my focus wanders here and there, but this is always done in retrospect. I am no different from you. We are notoriously bad at reconstructing these past moments explaining the meanderings of our attention and distraction.

So, where does this leave us?