Are You As Distracted As I Am?

I just spent two days hiking by myself in central Oregon, occasionally seeing people, but going long stretches with nothing between myself and nature.

Nothing, that is, but my tendency to document - and analyze - events, instead of simply experience them. The first day, hiking to the waterfall you see here, I took hundreds of photos. Something beautiful? Snap. Something better? Snap. Red leaves! Snap, snap.

It was hard - unbelievably hard - to simply be in the woods, instead of being so motivated to capture every moment. This struggle reminded me of something a more patient friend once told me:

You are always one thought away from actually experiencing reality."

In other words, I have a tendency to stay at arm's length from what's happening around me. Instead of experiencing it without judgment, I never stop thinking and thus everything has to first pass through a blur of my thoughts.

Is this sounding familiar? You don't do the same thing, do you?

By day two, things started to settle down. The landscape around me was so breathtaking, I simply stopped thinking. I stood on a log for a long time... perhaps 10 or 15 minutes, before I looked down, saw my shadow, and it occurred to me that taking the photo at left might remind me to calm down when I got back home.

There was a remarkable difference. When a hawk took off or a chipmunk scampered, I noticed and simply observed. The compulsion to act, to snap a picture, to think about tonight or tomorrow... they all receded into the background.

True confession

This was unbelievably hard. It was only after I hiked a long way uphill, only after I tired of always having my camera out, and only when I stopped having other people around... that my thoughts quieted down.

When this happened, I stopped being distracted.

I'd say I'm much less distracted than lots of my friends, many of whom don't remember what people told them five minutes ago. But it was still shockingly hard to settle down.

Truth is, I don't have sage advice to give you about useful ways to discover if you are distracted, and to cure yourself if the answer is yes. All I can share is that in my case, it has taken two days just to make a dent in my distraction. You might want to start looking for an opportunity to do the same.

Bruce Kasanoff is a ghostwriter for entrepreneurs and executives. Learn more at Kasanoff.com. He is the author of How to Self-Promote without Being a Jerk.

Images by the author.