The Outward Tug

“Your life is the sum of what you focus on.”  –Winifred Gallagher

Those simple words gripped me when I read them a few summers ago. They have yet to let go. Whenever I read them, my heart stirs and my mind floods: Time is a precious gift! Eliminate the irrelevant, elevate the grand! On my best days, my daily actions match my peak-state thoughts.

But it’s hard. Life pounds us with distraction. You know the ones – media, both mass and social. Advertisements. Breaking news. Rivers of information that endlessly enter our eyes and ears. This noisy deluge yanks our attention away from ourselves, out toward others. Look at her, what about him, eat this, wear this, watch that, did you hear about THIS?

Call it the Outward Tug.

We’re immersed in the Outward Tug. Modern life blitzes us with other people, other events, other gadgets, other stories, other shocking news you absolutely must know this very moment, right now, look! Out, out, look out, away from yourself.

The Outward Tug beats our inner eye blind – that subtle side of ourselves that notices our own thoughts, our own perceptions, our own connections, desires, friendships, hopes, disappointments, excitements, thrills, musings, curiosities, oddities, hilarities, amazements, joys. The wet, messy miracle in your skull holds billions of neurons firing trillions of times per second. The creative potential hiding in you (yes, you) and every person alive today dazzles the mind, like seven billion beams of kaleidoscopic colors. And yet. We scroll and stream. 

Fight the Outward Tug by making an Inward Turn. And quotes. Quotes help too.

“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y.

This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral…You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

― Terence McKenna