Find the Focus

Focus can be a wonderful thing.

Focus is the gate through which we can force all things to enter through.  It's the floodgates where we fling our energy instead of dissipating it into the stream.  It's the single act of drawing and cutting instead of carelessly pulling out our sword and slashing about.

Perhaps for myself the story of my life is this constant struggle I am undergoing between trying to find focus and living my life.  The two are at best not synonymous and worst are contradictory.  But I get the sense that those who succeed - and when I say succeed, I mean specifically those who are most integrated, most enjoying their lives, not necessarily the most monetarily rewarded - have figured out a way to combine the two.

When focus exists - when your life is lived through the lens of moving in a particular way to accomplish a particular thing - life moves.  Things are not just performed as a series of random disconnected actions but as a more and more seamless whole, all things running together towards a larger things.  One does some things; one lets other things go because they are contributing to the greater focus.  Eventually, I believe, the various parts of one's mind and soul are more wholly integrated as actions and being and philosophy merge into one.  "What you seem to be, be really" said Benjamin Franklin.  Focus will do that for us.

How do we get and keep focus?  That's the sticking point, the thing that constantly seems to rip me back to reality.  For me - I assume for many - what we wish to focus on and what we actually focus on are two entirely separate things.  So often our lives seem disconnected from that which we wish to do and mired in that which we must.  Focus becomes all that more important.  But how to get it and keep it on those goals?

I have a suggestion.  It's not original with me, but it works.  It's from Miyamoto Musashi:  "Do nothing which is of no use."

This is a key - not the key perhaps, but a key.  We all have limited time.  We all have things we have to do.  The point is that we need to make everything we do work towards the focus.

Admit it: I am (and you are) frivolous with time. We're extravagant.  We spend time on things the way children will spend money on candy if given the chance:  freely, lavishly, without a care in the world about the future.

As with savings, working towards those things of value in our lives is a series of building a bank account of accomplishments.  Accomplishments take time.  Accomplishments take doing things of use.

We need to learn (I most of all) to make all my tasks serve the goal, the focus.  Even work - mind numbing work - can serve the focus if we let it.  If by working we pay bills and enable ourselves to have time to work on other things, it is time not wasted.  And even at work, our focus can shift towards not just tasks but skills.  Learning to work diligently and for long periods of time on a task is not something which only applies to our working lives.

The other half?  Shed that which is useless.  Make every action and task serve your focus.  Is it not useful, not serving to help you work towards that which you are focusing on?  Consider abandoning it or making it serve the higher goal. Our lives are always more full of things that we can do than things we will have time to do. Determine to make every one of things something which is useful.

Because ultimately, focus is an output of which time and effort are inputs.  Time and effort are both finite and have an end date - a date which will never know until it arrives.

Determine to focus.  Determine to abandon that which is useless.