ADHD, green onions + (some) thoughts on priorities
Babes and bots, It's spring! The flowers are blooming, the snow keeps falling, and most days it teeters between 30° and 80° F. This is Colorado, I suppose. My mentor recently gave me some advice: focus. Don't intercede every observation with "when I was 7 years old...", avoid narrative. Just write the thing. Smell the thing, taste the thing, hear the thing, feel the thing, see the thing. Rely on non-dominant senses to open your mind, empathize, and engage in a practice of radical noticing. So I did it, I crafted 8 pages of observations, some of which I talked about in my last post. This process was painful and time-consuming. The urge I felt to weave a narrative and disrupt intense observation with immersive, self-loathing dialogue or memory, made me hate myself. In the end, this was a good practice. It forced me to focus my thoughts, as it was designed to do, on a single thing. And that thing was a plant, or a swamp, or the feeling of whitewater, or snow. This was ...