You wouldn’t get that sense looking at this blog, but my practice has been really solid for the past month or so. I’ve even been writing about it! I just haven’t wanted to do it in little bite-sized chunks every day and put them on the internet. I think, for the moment, the feedback loops of blogging are actually inhibiting my writing.

I was onto something with my last entry, which was over a month ago, but I don’t think I took it far enough. What’s distracting me from productive work is the very idea of the internet out there, listening, hungry for more Content™.

I’m chewing on some big ideas right now. It’s producing notes and scraps that I just want to keep collecting and working on and mulling over. I don’t want to be beholden to anyone — even imaginary people — to do anything in particular with them. I want to spend all the time and energy I have for writing working on this. So I’m putting the blog on pause again for a while. As usual, I may surprise myself and pop in from time to time.

Thanks as always for reading. Stay tuned for the results of this process… sometime.

— Jon

It’s time to get real. I’m wasting too much time every day on pointless stuff online, and I’m not even enjoying it.

This is hardly some novel realization; I’ve been off most social media for over a year now. But I’m still finding ways to waste my life in an endless series of apps I’m “just checking” for some new hit.

Sometime this weekend, I just got fed up. It can’t be that hard to just… stop doing this. Can it?

I mean, I understand that it’s very easy to succumb to digital distraction. I understand that this software is designed to exploit deeply compulsive loops in our brains. But isn’t that a textbook mindfulness problem? This is what I’ve been training for all this time!

The basic task is clear: to slow down my decision-making and mindfully decide whether everything I do during “productive time” is the right thing to do. Rather than go up against diabolical tech empty-handed, though, I have a secret weapon. I’m calling it a “Day Log.”

I’m putting a notebook and pen on my desk right next to my computer, and when my mind reaches for a distraction, I will reach out and grab the notebook instead. I’ll make a log entry about what I was doing, what needs to be done, and how I’m feeling, and I’ll use this to figure out what to do next.

It’s not just about the stopping and thinking; the physical, analog object is part of the solution. It’ll be the anchor in the present and the physical body, like the breath during meditation. If writing longhand is to screwing around online as just breathing is to monkey mind, this should do the trick.

Practically all my meditation training has been in disciplines of opening the attention to admit all available phenomena, in order to learn to be present with them. But as someone easily irritated by sensation, it’s incredibly therapeutic to me to close my attention to outside phenomena, especially if I’m trying to concentrate.

Even though it’s the opposite of my meditation instructions, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m still practicing when I’m doing this.

Often I can’t achieve this state of closed concentration without a pair of noise-canceling headphones and a good myNoise setting. But once I’ve got the world well and truly blocked out, deeply interesting things begin to arise.

For one thing, my mind quiets itself. I get a clear sense that the thinking part of my mind is like the surface of a pond, and the world is chucking rocks into it all the time, creating unending turbulence. When I artificially put a force field around the pond, it quickly goes still. Only slight perturbations from below the surface ripple out, and they dissipate without a trace.

An emotion of relief arises, too, and that quickly gives way to compassion. All beings are having rocks tossed into their ponds, and even the best force fields are impermanent. My gratitude for a brief respite is powerful enough to reorient me towards the outside with an attitude of leaving no trace, tossing no rocks, even a desire to protect others from disturbance.

Doesn’t that sound super Buddhist? Yet no Buddhist-trained person has ever told me to block out sensations. Maybe I just haven’t asked the right question yet.