Dark Focus

Dark focus. I like this phrase. Objects and emotions and thoughts emerging from the darkness over time, swallowed back into blackness with sudden exposure to light. Accidental visions you can only see clearly without trying.

Perhaps you have a defined trajectory, a Life Plan in explicit detail. Allow me to say that this M.O. has always astonished me. “Figure I put in three more years in my current position and then leverage that into management for another 5-10…by then we’ll have paid off most of the mortgage through accelerated payments and our (as yet unborn) daughter will be in school, so we can look at getting a vacation property, etc.” Holy shit. Really? Wow.

I’m going to make the case for a different way of living. Namely, living intuitively. This is an unsettled way to travel, to be sure. Sometimes it results in long layovers in undesirable places, running like hell to make connections. Other times, the best course of action seems to be blowing it all off and sitting at the airport bar making idle chatter with strangers, watching the planes take off and land. It is a state of transit rather than an act of arrival.

For an optimist like myself, good always trumps bad en route. Shit happens, but I get to meet all sorts of people, and sometimes my connections click perfectly, I’m upgraded to first class and my luggage is first off the carousel. Or not. Unsettled. Surprise after surprise. Not the all-inclusive.

It would make life easier—or more accurately, it would make it reassuring—to have a life plan and live accordingly. And it would require me to be a totally different person.

I understand the compulsion to plan, but can’t help seeing it as a trap. The quicksand of complacency, the snare of rigidity. Who can plan for global economic implosions or car accidents or infertility or illness or falling in love with someone other than your husband? Or your father deciding he’s had enough of this life and goodbye? These events happen, and require the ability to react, to adapt, not analyze.

Either through temperament or habit, I yield to intuition. Experience is teaching me to temper this with patience, and not confuse it with instinct. We’re primitive animals whose physical evolution has not kept pace with our brain development. Anger, lust, protection—reflexive impulses that can drive us for both good and bad. I’m all for a modicum of prudence.

Indulge me in a short rant. Intuition is undervalued in our culture. It’s been denigrated in status to a treacly gush of Feeling, not rooted in anything sensible. Even for its proponents, there is a mawkish, mystical element to intuition that is celebrated as something divinely feminine (whatever that means). I respectfully disagree. And I call bullshit.

Intuition is the natural wisdom of the subconscious, informed by constant tides of sensory clues we don’t think about but our bodies acknowledge. It is smart versus clever.

The rational culture dismisses this. Our rational culture, which promises utopia if we only adhere to a logical procession, is wilfully myopic. It gives us environmental degradation as an economic externality, civilian deaths in conflict as collateral damage, political corruption as the cost of doing business. It is madness, in short. It is stopping to tie our shoelace in the path of a speeding bus.

So sweeping cultural criticism aside, you may ask yourself: what’s this got to do with me? That is a good question, always the question for each of us at the end of every day. Right on. If you’re dead or in a coma or otherwise insensate, you lack perspective; therefore the world does not exist outside yourself. It’s not narcissistic to be the sun around which all revolves—who the fuck else is supposed to be at the centre of your universe? (and you new mums, please don’t start with me) You are accountable for you. The correct question is always, ultimately: what’s in it for me?

Well, blink. Look at your life in dark focus. Resist the urge to shine a light on things. This is cheating, when it comes to the important stuff. Plus you’ll only blind yourself and have to start all over again.

I struggle with an appetite for analysis and definition, but…blink, I order myself to blink. Things are slowly emerging from the darkness, yes scary things wrapped in shadows and panicked things that cannot see in the dark and fly into walls but others too, patient things which stand very still and look back at me and say, wait, I am here with you and soon you shall see and we will move further into the darkness together. Blink.