Focus, Determination or Determinant?
Ever sit by restaurant window, or on a bench along a busy street and watch the people walk by? When you have no idea what has someone’s attention, you have no real idea if they’re focused on something or just seem to be. I feel that way in class sometimes too. Although I can be pretty sure a student is focused on tai chi at any given moment, I can’t always tell what aspect they’re focused on. Besides that, I’m sometimes too busy watching their movements to notice a shift in their concentration.
Right about now you’re probably asking yourself, “What is John going on about this time?” Well we all choose to focus on different things, yet too often these choices are a result of our default thought patterns. If we want different results we really need to use our determination to focus on something else. Focusing on what we’re doing wrong means we’ll soon be making that mistake again, while focusing on a beer and a burger means you’ll soon be sitting somewhere eating a burger and drinking a beer. Neither one is necessarily good or bad; it’s just the way it works.
Have you ever noticed that when you really want something and you think about enjoying it, like that burger and beer, you usually end up right where you imagined you would? On the subject of tai chi, when we think about practicing and all the mistakes we make, we usually end up making those mistakes over and over. Once this gets to be too much for us we focus on something else and tai chi just fades away, no matter how much we wanted do it as we walked into that first class.
In the words of the infamous Bob Tzu:
Your thoughts?
John
P.S. I found this pic here: http://www.colinandyenyen.com/wordpress/2007/02/10/sunday-times-comfort-me-with-burgers/
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Aug 13, 2009 - 08:08:18Mmmmm-m-m . . . cheesecake . . . .
Another way to paraphrase the wisdom of the inestimable Bob Tzu is:
We become what we behold.
I try to re-mind myself to think of “focus” as I would with a camera, i.e., to mean “clarity,” and not just one-pointedness. That would imply to me, say, that while practicing tai chi, I maintain peripheral vision rather than looking fixedly straight ahead.
Another approach is to be careful to have “focus” reflect the quality of “attending”; again, so I don’t add strain to the process.
Good subject, John!
Thanks Walt,
I like the image of holding your vision in focus as well as on focus. That’s a good thing to share with students as they begin to progress. It really is funny how we seem to hold tension when we put too much effort into anything. Holding the eyes in “the proper place” with too much determination isn’t much different than holding the jaw tight while concentrating on how the arms are moving.
John