The Power of Focus

I’ve been thinking a lot about focus lately and how it is central to my sense of self — which is really a way of saying essential to my health and well-being. Yes, I mean physical health, but I also mean emotional and creative health, keys to living a satisfying, engaging (and potentially counterclockwise) life. I’ve been thinking so much about focus because I’ve temporarily lost mine. Or rather, I’ve had to let go of it. This is a predictable, every 3 to 4 year occurrence, a natural – yet nonetheless unsettling – part of my writing life.

When I write, when I am steeped in a new project, my life takes on a shape. There is order to my days. Order to my reading, my thinking, my conversation, even my dreaming. The book is like a planet, and I am its moon. I love the tug of that gravitational pull.

I love the way writing – not to mention the immersion work I do before I write — demands tunnel vision, the way it obliterates the twenty-first-century multi-tasker in me. You’d think all this intense mental activity would be stressful. But it is mostly the opposite of stressful. I exist in the calm center of the work. I find the ease in the effort. I never want to leave that place.

And then, one day, I have to. One day I finish the manuscript, and then the revisions and then everything else that has to do with bringing a book to completion. And I have to let go. I have to end the intense relationship I have had with the characters in the book and the world these characters inhabit. When I do that I am ending the lovely, insistent, book-driven rhythm of my days.

It’s not that I all of a sudden have nothing to do. It’s that all of a sudden I feel as if I have too much to do. With no one thing, there is now everything. And although I actually have less work, I feel more overwhelmed. And that stress everyone thinks I must feel while working on a project (but I don’t)? I feel it now. And in that place, it is oddly easy to compound the problem. To stay up way too late. To eat mindlessly. To lost patience with myself. To forget that I need nurturing and need to nurture.

For me, my healthiest (body, mind, spirit) place is when I am deeply, deeply engaged, single-mindedly engaged, in the work I love.

Here is the planet I’ve been circling, the focus of my days. It is now out in the world. Take a look!