This week, Buffy, one of my hens, went broody on me. It's a hormone thing. This isn't very useful to me: I want eggs, not chicks. And it's pretty unpleasant for the hen, too. Even though I gently remove all the eggs from her nest, so that she is sitting on nothing, sit she does, day in and day out. I've coaxed. I've offered food, friends, and other enticements. I've dumped her off the nest and locked her out of the hen house. But her hormones have carried her away and, in reacting to them, she posts herself outside the hen house door, growling pitifully and looking more like a tom turkey than a little red hen. So, after consulting with the vet, I am simply allowing her to attend to her empty nest for as long as she chooses. Nothing else seems to get her attention, with her birdie hormones roaring through her bloodstream.
It got me thinking about the power of attention, and the robbery of having one's attention hijacked. The obvious culprits are things like advertisements and various media, and I've long ago taken the wise advice to avoid those things unless they are dispensing information I actually want. So I wondered why I still felt, most of the time, as driven and growly as my poor hen.
The truth is, for most of my life, I have responded to anyone, anything. I thought I was making progress when, eventually, I learned to respond thoughtfully in a considered way, and not with reactive obedience. I suppose that *was* a step forward. But there is more, isn't there?
Another thing that got me thinking was using 750 Words as a means to do the morning writing, called Morning Pages, recommended by Julia Cameron in her Artist's Way books. I've long found that it is beneficial to do these writings first thing in the morning, before I read anything or speak to anyone. That seems to be the only time when the contents of my head originates with me alone, when it is not a reaction or response to someone or something else. Maybe I'm fragile that way, but it only takes one news story, one email, or one conversation to obscure my own thoughts from me.
Maybe I should have mentioned at the beginning of this post that I have no clever answers to the embarrassing dilemma of realizing you don't even know your own thoughts, let alone what to do with them. But at least I am on the trail.
There is the curious business of choosing what I will hear or see or consider at all. It is a great revelation to me to realize that I am not obliged to allow anyone and everyone to make announcements to me, to allow anyone to show me anything they wish, to allow anyone to demand I consider any notion they choose to present to me. Has all our emphasis on freedom of expression brainwashed me into believing that everyone has a Constitutional right to the brain power of my attention?
I suspect that many people know, either instinctively or with premeditation, that there is much to be gained in appropriating the attention and thereby the energy of others. People who create genuine chaos and destruction, or people who simply create noise and uproar, gain (if nothing else) the personal power of drawing to themselves energy and thought and reaction that is greater than their own. I also suspect there is great value in the inner quiet that exists in me before the day's first "announcements". And it's not a matter of teaching myself to be blind, deaf, and close-minded. It's a matter of practicing the freedom to choose where I will devote the energy of my attention, my sight, my thought. And how interesting, to begin to notice what I notice. What do I prefer? Before I even open my eyes in the morning, what do *I* wish to have within my view? Before I listen to anything but my alarm clock, what sounds do I wish for in my ears? What emotions do I hope to feel when I wake up? What thoughts do I wish to ponder, before my day has thrust itself into my path?
It has been strange to realize that these are actually hard questions to answer. And if I don't know the answers, I have no one to blame but myself, do I? LV
