John Walsh
-Author and art historian
Do one thing at a time. Give each experience all your attention. Try to resist being distracted by other sights and sounds, other thoughts and tasks, and when it is, guide your mind back to what you're doing.
~
I'm not warning against learning many things on many subjects, and virtuosity can indeed be useful. My warning is against distraction, whether you invite it or just let it happen, as I've done all my life. In baseball, high-percentage hitters know better: it's "focus" they talk about, and they prize it as much as strength. Psychologists describe skilled rock climbers and tennis players and pianists as going beyond focus, to what they have called a "flow" experience, a sense of absorption with the rock or the ball or the music in which the "me versus it" disappears and there's a kind of oneness with the task that brings a joyful higher awareness, as well as successful performance. I've had these experiences, too little but not too late, and probably you have, too. They are a supreme kind of pleasure. You will have more of them if you do one thing at a time.
~
Spend more time listening. Lawyers have a saying about conferences between legal opponents: "The side doing the talking is losing," For the longest time I thought that the test of my value was what I had to say. When I wasn't talking, I did listen to others, but with half my mind figuring out what I'd say next. It's as though I had been listening to music and just registering the melody but not hearing the harmony, the instruments, the subtleties of phrasing. To really listen takes active attention. To have listened and absorbed the whole message, with all its connotations, its unspoken and maybe unintended shadings, makes it likelier that when you do speak, you will contribute more, and do so with fewer words.
...
Learn to draw. Or to play the cello. Or to tap dance, Something impractical, even useless. Whatever it is, it ought to be hard for you, something you haven't really got time for, and that by professional standards you probably won't ever do well. I recommend drawing because when you get it right, maybe only once in a while, you will have such amazing waves of surprise and joy. And I promise that you'll have always be able to draw on a personal insight, a visceral empathy, with centuries of artists and their struggles to get it right.
Keep a journal. For a lot of people this is harder than tap dancing. Knowing you're going to write something every day sharpens your attention to everything that happens. With a journal, you have this companion you're going to point things out to, so you stockpile impressions and passing thoughts, or, if you have a fitful memory like mine, you jot down notes to yourself It's good to begin with modest expectations - a spiral notebook from the drugstore, not a leatherbound diary with little red ribbon. Limit the time you spend at it, but do it every day. When you fail, start again. And again. For the longest time, I didn't keep a journal, and as a result much of my pretty long and interesting life is lost to me. That's a waste, one that you needn't let happen to you.
...
Read the full commencement address »
Wheaton College
Norton, MA
2000
Sent in by: admin
Posted on: 03.20.2006