A few summers ago, while hiking in the mountains, I saw a very large sea bird zooming over my head. Today, I read in the Arizona Daily Star, “Brown Pelican blown off course finding itself landlocked in Tucson.” Seabirds are not a common sight in the Arizona desert, but due to monsoon storms, and increased wind speeds, they sometimes get off course.  This lucky pelican will be taken to San Diego for a little vacation, and then go free to soar again in more familiar territory.

Sometimes, lately, like the pelican, I feel, “off course.” For instance this morning, on the way to the bathroom to clean the sink, I moseyed into the bedroom and made the bed instead, and then I returned to the kitchen with the bathroom cleaning rag still over my shoulder—not having cleaned the bathroom sink at all.  

Clearly, I had been blown off course—distracted. Maybe it was because I had switched on the TV  in the bedroom. It is understandable, that, when bombarded with bad news about COVID-19, a 100,000 acre forest fire in my mountains, and social unrest no wonder it is difficult to stay focused. And the weatherman is no help at all with a prediction of  a 115 degree heat wave around the bend.

Attention comes at a cost, and I have found that thinking is the ultimate distraction, so I walk about thinking a lot these days, but I am not the only distracted person in my neighborhood. I often encounter people who are also in La La Land. So, just for fun, although I try to communicate, I can sense that they are mentally somewhere else. For instance, I go swimming (one person at a time) everyday in the indoor pool, just around the corner from my apartment . On the way home, I invariably run into a neighbor who will ask, “How was the water?” And, I answer, “Wet! Incredibly wet!” If he asks me the same question the next day, I will say, “It seems to be getting wetter.” As I said, “Attention comes at a cost.”

The internet is a great distraction. Playing with a machine is so much more fun than doing the laundry. Maybe staying focused is only as important as the goal. That’s why I ruminated over  a
question asked by Marty Rubin, “Is daydreaming a distraction from work, or is work a distraction from daydreaming?”

Some distractions seem to shorten my days, especially the creative ones such as painting images on rocks, and reading a good book (if you can find one) also helps.  Of course some people take distractions to the extreme, and are so easily distracted that these scatterbrains can’t ever focus on the task at hand.

I have discovered that often distraction is just where I want to go, because as Rousseau reminds me, “The world of reality has it’s limits. The world of imagination is boundless.”

Esther Blumenfeld (Glad my teakettle has a whistle)