Distraction

Collage of an old lady with a moon, snowflakes, and a universe in her hand, making her way through the world. Of course, she’s distracted.

Yes, I am distracted. I’ve been looking for distractions all day. Anything to keep me from thinking about 165,000 plus lives, deaths. Anything will do.

First came games. Wordscapes, Solitaire, Suduko, for as long as my brain would focus. Then the doorbell rang. Amazon, with a book I ordered. Thankfully, it a book by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. I’m teaching a class in fall and I’ve been looking for a book with information on punctuation with examples that students would read and would want to remember. Another cup of coffee and I sit down to thumb through it. Two hours later and I am sated with sumptuous sentences. Who could resist tidbits like these, each a story in itself.

Examples for commas:

We’ll have more than rhetorical and ontological questions, young lady, when we get to your whereabouts last night.

The hot flashes, although somewhat soothed by penguins and ice cream, still startled her from sizzling slumbers, scorched her sunsets with added intensity, and lit up the dark side of her swoons.

And,

Nobiscus Kahn, professor of angst, used to cry all over his lectern and ruin his lovingly prepared notes.

Have you ever seen an English handbook with the likes of those delicacies?

Next, after a distracting chat with my daughter, I was left to find my own distractions again. An hour on the stationary bike and the first episode of Lock and Key on Netflix held the statistics at bay. I thought perhaps some meditation and quiet deep breathing may work. And thankfully I had Ashley Neese’s tome on How to Breathe by my side.

“ . . . The Focus Breath invites the use of specific sound, or mantra, on the exhale. Sound in the form of a mantra has been used for centuries in Eastern cultures as a technique for quieting the mind. New research on the brain and behavior has shown that these mantras are very effective for changing the state of . . . .”

And,

Find a comfortable position . . . .

Breath in and out . . . .

Inhale through the nose for two counts . . . .

Exhale through the mouth, . . . for as long as you can without force . . . .

It helps but I don’t think I can do this all day long. A few minutes is potent enough.

Then, on for a bout with Mark Twain as he held forth on “Corn-pone Opinions.” He was considering the opinions of a friend who held forth that a “man is not independent, and cannot afford views which might interfere with his bread and butter. If he would prosper, he must train with the majority; in matters of large moment, like politics and religion, he must think and feel with the bulk of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing and in his business prosperities.” Twain waded through some irony and was drawn to the consideration that when confronting issues, we need “a searching personal examination “ of an issue; a man must be right with himself first. “But,” Twain continues, a “political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force,” especially as it pertains to “self-interest.”

This was not distracting enough. Too close to the news of the day.

Finally, I tried a video my sister sent to me, Piers Morgan on CNN, discussing COVID19—I gave in. As a friend of Trump’s, he had some advise for the president. He argued that the president, or any world leader, “has got to be calm, they have got to show authority, they have to be honest, they have to be accurate, entirely factual with what they are telling the people, and they have to have the ability to show empathy. At almost every level of that, at the moment, Donald Trump is failing the American people.”

Sigh. This was not distracting at all. This is the news of the day. I should go back to practicing breathing, to dallying with Gordon’s delicious sentences. But beneath all these efforts at distraction, I am left with a hunger for just what Morgan was talking about, empathy. I’m hungry for leadership that cares more about people than his own personal self interests and the success of his business. This void in American leadership is leaving a gaping hole in the American soul. And, at least for today, I am unable to be distracted from it.

Tonight, the count is up to more than 170,000 people around the world who have died from this virus in the last five months. Perhaps not only is not possible to be distracted from this; perhaps one shouldn’t be distracted from it. This is today.

But I can only do my part by sitting here, staying home, waiting, breathing, breathing deeply, breathing, breathing, breathing deeper still. Sometimes distraction doesn’t work. In those hours, we just feel. We observe what is, we acknowledge what is, we send what good into the world to those 170,000+ families that we can. Just like the Buddhist monks do.

I will wake up tomorrow, and I will do it again, as I breathe, and I search for laughter and life and light. For tonight, I am wishing you well, my friend.