Ever heard of that “manifesting” thing?
The whole “law of attraction” concept?
Wherever you focus your attention and intention, becomes real? Like, if your focus is on fear of spiders (hi.), you’ll think there’re more of them in the world than there are oxygen molecules. If you’re obsessed with Starbucks (hi, again.) it will seem like there’s one on every street corner. (Realizing this last example may be ineffective. Because they are everywhere. Moving on).
With that in mind, sometimes I wonder if this mystical theory really isn’t that much more than the power of your own brain taking note of things in your surroundings and reinforcing them as your reality. Science kinda has my back on this one – with a thing called “attention bias”. Whether it’s desire for a new gadget or being in chronic pain, under brain scans, the parts of our brains that seal in emotions and decision making all light up when we see the stuff we’re emotionally attached to. And that can become cyclical (i.e. it lights up because we’re seeing this thing we’ve already connected with, it reinforces, then we keep looking for it). That over-activity is what happens in addicts, often.
But the interesting thing they don’t tell you a lot of the time, is how desire for a gadget and focus on pain aren’t terribly different. In fact, an old spiritual dude sitting under a tree till he got cauliflower ass, once said “desire is the seed of misery”. And we all know emotional and physical pain aren’t too far off from one another. So whether I desire the new ipad air everyone else has or I’m focusing on the things that link me to a bodily affliction – either way – I’m reinforcing misery.
But there’s – as ever – a solution.
(Which they never offer in these little articles I read on this stuff).
And that comes from a saying that applies to us all (whether it’s smoking, pain, drugs, or technology, we’re obsessed with) which goes: “When the pain gets bad enough, we try another way.” This isn’t wrong. Sometimes it’s the pain of hitting a bottom (your gaming addiction got you fired from work and you kept playing till Dominion shut your power off). Or the pain of living a habitual, meaningless, and suffocating existence you refuse to let asphyxiate you anymore. Or just the pain of physical pain itself – knowing you can’t keep masking it with analgesics, shoving your head in the sand, and expecting the mortal wounds to spontaneously Jesus-heal under an inadequate Band-Aid (and no magic messiah powers); realizing it will only fester and turn you into a kyphotic old lady if you stay this course. And that’s not cute. I want to be classy Helen Mirren when I get old, not some last-stages post-menopausal version of Marlon Brando bearing barren ovaries all the way to an early grave.
That’s inspo enough for me.
So, am I making my own reality? Are all of us? Every morning?
Every moment?
(Paint that pain gold, too).
Yeah, absolutely.
This is apparent to me when I wake up and my first instinct is to tell everyone just how much I hate them on an interpersonal level. I don’t, but when you wake up physically hurting every day, even the trees outside your window look like they’ve got inimical intentions. You go into defense mode very quickly, bypassing the whole “I hurt” bit. That’s why those first few seconds of consciousness are vital to harness. If I emotionally attach to that first A.M. assault on my muscles, there’s a good chance I won’t stretch or do anything I need to to fix it.
(Except bring a bag of coffee grinds back to my bed, dump a carton Amy’s coconut creamer in it, and then proceed to eat it with a ladle like coco puffs from underneath a tent of blankets.)
Contrarily, if I decide to focus my attention on rising above, the whole world’s altered. There’s no chance for what I like to call my “shitty focus muscles” to get a morning workout in. Do I still hurt? Yeah, but I’m more willing to actually do stuff I need to while the coffee brews – all because I’ve chosen to try on another outlook outfit from my cognitive wardrobe.
(Admit it. You were totally expecting the head explosion gif, you dark bastards.)
That way, that annoying thing they talk about – that attention bias in my brain – isn’t doing the broken record thing in the back of it like the worst D.J. in the world: “My body hurts (wiccki-wickiii!), just like it hurt this morning (WUBdubdub), it’ll probably destroy my run (DROP the bass), it will likely hurt tonight too….” In a way, I suppose hope is the biggest thing you have to pretend to have to change a seemingly bleak reality.
I say pretend, because I never had it, till I pretended my way into it.
Then, suddenly, it changed the track on that “attention bias” thing to the point where if I did maybe ten or fifteen minutes of just dealing with it right away in the A.M., it’d mitigate my sitch at least a bit. Even if it’s not a magic bullet, it certainly injures those shitty focus muscles enough to keep them outta their pumas and off my mental race track most mornings. Whether you want to call that manifesting, god, or the brain you’re a slave to physically stamping whatever you focus on into reality doesn’t matter.
But personally – as a compulsive, obsessive addict I tend to employ all three.
And then focus my attention on finding more labels.
Hey, it beats reinforcing desire and pain and avoiding a far sexier reality.
“A rose by any other name…”