Attention:

Male Mountain Bluebirds. This flock was feasting on Russian olives. There were hundreds of birds in a stand of trees along the Price River.

Capitalists have constructed our reality. They have done so because it helps them hoard additional wealth. For whatever reason, these super-villains believe that they need more money than you or I could spend in thousands of lifetimes. They have filled our everyday existence with advertisements and gadgets that take our attention away from what really matters in life, because doing so funnels more cash from us, to them. It feels like there are few places I can go to escape these distractions, and focus on what I consider to be true reality.

I have been working to reclaim my attention. I no longer use social media. I have removed most apps from my phone, and don’t pay for any that are subscription-based. I don’t watch TV. I refuse to check work emails or slack messages unless I’m on the clock. I rarely shop online, and try to buy everything I need here in my small town. I’m beginning to re-focus through birding, meditation, writing, and carefully/critically reading, but even in these realms, the vestiges of capitalist interruptions are able to infiltrate my inner sanctuary. I am working on rooting them out, and living a life where I am fully present in that which fulfills me. I am focusing on an existence in which I have cultivated an authentic presence.

My ability to focus has changed over the last 10-15 years. It’s impossible for me to sit in meditation for 10 minutes, without intrusive thoughts bouncing all over the place. I sometimes find it challenging to focus on reading dense text, when I used to love to fully delve into difficult material. I sit down to write, and get sidetracked by something else online. Even when I’m out birding, my brain can be focused on something trivial, like purchases that would make my favorite pastime only slightly easier, but much more gadgety. I have been conditioned to let myself be pulled in so many different directions, so even when I’m actively trying to exist in a different way, my brain is trapped in routine.

I have been set up to be scattered. My attention feels like a handful of confetti released into the wind. Social media trained me to focus on what mere acquaintances are up to every second, and to assign way too much importance to a bullshit reward system of likes and shares. E-commerce advertising made me feel like I almost instantly had to acquire a bunch of gimmicky junk to fill needs that I never knew I had beforehand. Cell phones and email give people access to me 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. My job reaches into my personal time as well, typically when I am dreading going back to work. I want my time on earth to add up to more than the expansion of someone else’s abhorrent wealth.

A group of powerful people made the decision that this is what my life is supposed to be like. I had no say in it. I have so little faith in changing a system with so much global state backing, so I just have to do my best to opt out, and try to gather the pieces of my attention span that have been eroded over the years.

This morning, I set a meditation timer for two minutes, and tried to stay present the entire time. When the two minutes were up, I took a short break, and then started all over again. I meditated for my normal amount of time, it was just broken up into smaller intervals, and it worked out a lot better. Before I began, I thought, “I want to focus on 12 breaths during a two-minute time period,” and I tried to get there. The closest I was able to come was nine breaths, but I was focused on all of them.

I used my phone timer for the meditation, but afterwards, I reinstated an old, yet recently neglected rule, where this distraction device is not allowed at my desk. I found a kitchen timer that I wasn’t using for anything else, so I could keep the rule intact going forward. This is where I do my meditations, study, and writing, and it is a sacred space. From now on, when I am here, I will silence all notifications and leave the phone in my bedroom across the hall.

After I finished my morning routine, I left the house, and birded the Price River outside of Wellington, Utah. When I pulled up to my favorite section of the 137-mile-long waterway, I heard the noisy clamor of a migratory feeding frenzy. White-crowned Sparrows, Dark-eyed Juncos, American Robins, Northern Flickers, and Mountain Bluebirds were extremely active in the tamarisk and Russian olives along the soggy banks. I parked my truck in between some trees, and a weedy area where the ground-feeding sparrows and juncos were scratching for seeds underneath a layer of desert dirt that had been laid down by our prevalent winds. The robins, bluebirds, and flickers were taking the Russian olive berries whole, and having some difficulty swallowing them. Even the larger flickers had to tilt their heads all the way back, and go through multiple attempts to get down the waxy, half-inch fruits. The bluebirds were closest to me, and are so visually stunning, that I spent the most binocular time with them. I watched for over an hour, relaxing, and finishing my morning coffee while I was there.

When I first pulled up, and scanned all these species that are ubiquitous in Carbon County, I thought of more exciting birds that I could see farther on down the road, but then I realized that this was similar to the type of distraction which I was trying to free myself from. All five of these species are common here, and I typically don’t give them the attention they deserve. Each are beautiful in their own way, whether it’s the zebra striped head pattern of adult White-crowned Sparrows, or the azure color of Mountain Bluebirds that is reminiscent of a summer desert sky. I have seen all of these species hundreds of times throughout the winter, but many of those sightings were marred by a brief glance, and a malignant distraction. Today, I made the decision to be present, and I spent extra time sitting within the show that these common birds put on for me as I stayed still.

My two most cherished values in this life are a love for nature, and a desire to share it with others. In an hyper-connected world, where digital distractions run amok, and steal my time and attention, it can be incredibly hard to fill my day with purpose. I’m looking to get back to a simplicity and focus that I haven’t known for a long time. I have been gradually broken down for years, and by the time I noticed the change, I realized that a drastic correction must be undertaken to reverse the effects of a carefully-calculated theft of my focus.

When the bluebirds moved on, I decided to do the same thing. I looked at my analog wristwatch, so I wouldn’t have the chance to see whatever else was going on on my phone screen in addition to the clock. I pulled out my pocket notebook to jot down a list of the birds I had seen, figuring I could enter them into an eBird checklist later in the evening, when I didn’t have birds right in front of me.

As cliche as it sounds, this is the only life that I have to live. I can give my time and attention to bullshit billionaires, or I can give it to birds. I’ll always do my best to choose the latter, I just have to do a little reconfiguring to fully get back there. The first step to overcoming a challenge is to observe the problem. After that, I just have to take a series of actions that rewrite patterns into something much more fruitful. Today I continued to reinforce new habits, so I can get back to a place where I can truly say that my life is for the birds.