Airports, Arguments & Authenticity

The problem with distraction is it stops us from being present, which stops us from being able to authentically respond to reality. If we can’t feel like we are responding truly as ourselves, even unconsciously, we feel subtly unfulfilled.

Most people want to avoid naked reality. Distraction helps them do this. The problem is that most of us don’t know we are becoming distracted. We even seek it. This keeps us chronically unfulfilled, chronically inauthentic, without knowing why.

Read on for my personal story about distractibility, its link to my personal story, and how I am working with it as a growth practice.

AIRPORTS

On our journey home from our Mexico vacation, we had nearly 8 hours in combined lay-overs between Houston and Denver.

In all that airport time, there was something I began to notice about myself.

I am incredibly distractible. Vastly more so than I had ever realized.

I always knew I was distractible. Having been diagnosed with ADHD at age 8, medicated for 10 years on 30mg of methylphenidate (Ritalin) daily, and having struggled with habits of screen usage that bordered on addictive, ever since smart phones came out, I know distraction!

In that way, I could say I’m kind of an expert on distraction. On getting distracted, that is.

While walking through the airport with my partner and our 2 and ½ year old son, I continually noticed - and it became more obvious as the day wore on - that I have a constant compulsion to look at other people. At them, in their face, as they walk by.

Not staring exactly, and not everyone. Just the people on the other side of the moving sidewalk or escalator, for example. The people standing next to me at the gate.

My partner Emma and I have a running joke (not so funny) about how I always have my attention out there – when we’re on a date, when we’re at an event, even while driving the car. My entire attention can snap out of myself, without my realizing it, until I’ve gone away entirely from the conversation at hand, with precious little attention paid to myself, nevermind my partner.

Why am I doing that?

Over a salad and a $23 burger at Elway’s in Terminal B at Denver airport, I attempted to answer that question.

I heard myself say that I am both wanting to be seen and not wanting to be seen. The wanting-to-be-seen part is hoping to see someone I know. The not-wanting part is also hoping to see someone I know, but with a kind of vigilance, making sure that if I am seen by someone who might make fun of me, that I won’t be caught looking dumb.

And of course, in this automatic self-hijacking of my sovereignty, I’m on the lookout for someone that my younger self might want to impress, or a someone my younger self wasn’t seen by - with the airport somehow being an unconscious second chance to impress them, or, rather, get a second chance to be seen for who I am, who I was.

It’s not that the person I’m hoping to see is a real person. I’m sure there is no such person. In fact, any inquiry into who this person is would only reveal more about me, not them.

I realized there is some link between my vulnerable, sensitive, younger self and my distractibility. A connection between the part of me that wasn’t seen in a loving way - along with my still active vulnerability around that - and my constant, vigilant scanning for some remediation of that wound.

A protective mechanism, it would seem.

I’m becoming distracted because I’m afraid, not consciously, but almost somatically, that I’m still walking the streets of my high school. Like some hidden part of me is sleep walking through that airport, scanning, looking, waiting…

Distracted.

Let me bring in another thread. It may seem unrelated at first.

ARGUMENTS

This may get a little personal.

Starting about the second year of my partner’s and my relationship, we started to fight a lot. The fights were always challenging, but they became heart-breaking when we could see their impact on our son.

I knew that the solution involved both of us, but I also knew it was time for me to do something I had not yet been able to do in my life: effectively confront the part inside me I call my critic.

I had to learn to stop myself from arguing in the moment I was arguing. I had to learn to walk away. I had to learn to stop my critic.

I’ll skip ahead so you can find out how it went: not good. It turns out it’s really, really, really hard for me to walk away from an argument once I am triggered and in the throws of making my point (and pointing out how she is wrong).

Based on my understanding of human psychology, and my own introspection, I understand my critic to be a protector of me (not unlike the distracting part). I understand him to be a part that, even though he is very rational and well-intentioned (to himself), his entire somatic gesture, regardless of content, is basically saying “Pay attention to me!”

He can be really intense.

Once I discovered it was a fool’s errand to try and restrain him once activated, I realized I had only one hope remaining. I had to turn to the part inside me he is seeking to protect. That sensitive, vulnerable young part of me.

My little boy.

Add to the fact that the stakes were, all of a sudden, tremendously high. I really felt like I could lose my family if I didn’t get a hold of him.

I began to secretly spend the first 30 minutes of the morning, before my family awoke, doing soft, deep belly breathing. I might lay my hands on my belly and gently rub in circles. Other days I might self-pleasure, slowly, and without ejaculating. If content arose, residue from a fight or trigger the previous day, I might allow the suffering part of me to speak, frown, cry or wail his perspective, his protest. I soften and relax into my body, connected to myself from head to toe.

The idea was to do whatever I could do to start my day with a kind of “bond” with my inner vulnerable part.

My theory was that, if I built a strong channel of communication with the most sensitive part of me, that if something happened to upset him later on, I was already “there” to be able to tend to his feelings.

I’d have a better chance to respond rather than react. I might even be able to advocate for his feelings and needs without handing things off to my reactive part.

What I’m talking about is nothing less than a total re-wiring of the way I was conditioned to do conflict.

AWARENESS

Back to the airport.

I discovered a kind of working somatic “posture” that I returned to as we continued to slog through the airport. My practice became two fold: bring my attention back to my sensate body, back to my breath, and allowing my visual field to simply take in content, without latching onto anything in particular. Just let people arise and fall through my awareness. No waiting for anyone, no looking for anyone.

A moving witness. A sensate seer. A buddha, walking.

I only linked these two threads - my distractibility and my critic - together once we had arrived at home. I realized their solution had something in common: slow, sensate body awareness practice. Later, I added the realization that distraction was itself a protective part.

So now I was holding two related threads. My distraction protects me from being re-wounded. My critic protects me from being re-wounded. What’s so bad about that?

I realized that my critic and my distracted part (my drifter, we could call him) both keep me from being capable of authentically engaging with the world. They keep me stuck in patterns that were handed to me, patterns that make me less of a factor in my creative life, my family, and the lives of people I wish to impact. They keep me mindlessly consuming what is given to me, reacting predictably, and remaining manipulatable by forces outside me that might not have my best interests at heart.

Basically, they keep me weak, attenuated, ineffective, disempowered- even victimized.

I realized that I am only as powerful or empowered as the part of me who can engage fully in any difficult situation that may arise.

I began to see these situations - an argument with my wife, a long walk through an airport, a visit to the supermarket - as tests of my ability to grow my creative capacity to lead my life with boldness, authority and groundedness.

AUTHENTICITY

I believe authenticity is the key to our fulfillment. If we cannot grow our capacity to be authentic, the scenery may change, our luck may fluctuate, but the world will not present novel challenges to our soul. We are stuck, and we don’t know why.

And not all of us has a drifter and an inner critic. Substitute victim or hero or joker or complainer or trouble-maker or depressed one or any of a hundred others for my drifter and critic. What would you call your protective part(s)?

We all have ways to protect ourselves from our own naked, shivering authenticity.

The difference between us is our willingness to confront that edge, seize the opportunity it presents, and discover ourselves in this moment, establishing a grounded, new country of our courageous unfoldment. It feels palpably different.

To be authentic is to train our nervous systems to come back to the inner quiet from which good decisions under stress can be made. To be authentic is to notice when we’ve offered a conditioned response, catch it, pause, and make a new choice. To be authentic is to be fulfilled, by repeatedly leaning into the fire of a world indifferent to our becoming, and become anyway. To be authentic is to prize ground over novelty, stillness over conditioned response, and flow over fear.

Authenticity is the grinding edge of our soul’s unfoldment.

It starts in our embodiment practice: our slow, sensate practice of the body’s grounded presence.