To Find Peace, Learn to Direct Your Attention
Inner peace is all about making deliberate choices, again and again
In the last newsletter, I talked about how where we put our attention affects our emotional well-being. In other words, what we feed our minds affects our state of mind. Today I want to talk about making choices to train the mind away from constantly focusing on the negative.
We’re having a very long, cold spring in my city. I live on an island in a temperate rainforest, and historically, spring has been much warmer. Since I moved here in 2008, we’ve had occasional days in the 50s starting in February, with days in the 60s and 70s following in March and April, respectively. Not many days, necessarily, just a few. There’s always a fair bit of rain until June, but it’s usually balanced out by the treat of warm, sunny days and the emergence of spring greens all over the city.
Not so much this year. Yesterday—April 20— we had atmospheric river-like downpours, with 65kph winds (about 45mph) and a wind chill below freezing.
It’s cold, and I’m ready for slightly warmer weather. I miss sitting outside and writing or editing. I miss walking without having to half-run to keep warm. I miss meditating outside. I miss walking in the forest. I could go on and on about all the things I do not like about this spring.
Adding to my Eeyore-ish-ness, yesterday a couple of seagulls dumped their dinner on my front window—which I can’t wash, because I’m three storeys up. (This is part of the story. Keep reading.)
Thanks to more than a decade of practice in observing and questioning my thoughts, I noticed this negative spiral, and I knew I had to do something to course-correct my emotional trajectory.
Neurons that wire together, fire together
When I was a kid, science said that the human brain was ‘hard wired’ and that nothing about the brain could change. Today, we know that the brain responds to its environment by changing itself. This is why it’s possible for someone like me to find inner peace in the first place. And if I can, given my history, that bodes well for others.
The more we think a certain way (or feed our minds a certain type of nutrition), the more our brains will work that way. The National Institutes of Health define neuroplasticity as “a process that involves adaptive structural and functional changes to the brain.”
In Buddhist psychology, this is often referred to with the phrase “neurons that fire together wire together.” In other words, rumination leads to more rumination; appreciation leads to more appreciation. Constant rumination is one variation of what we call depression. (I spent decades in that loop.)
So if I focus on UGH, it’s cold, and UGH, it’s grey, and UGH, the trees aren’t leafy green yet… the only thing that accomplishes is to wire my brain to look at the negative. Aka, “being relentlessly critical” (which, as I’ve said before, is not the same as the important skill of critical thinking).
My opinion is not going to change the weather (LOL). The weather is going to do whatever it’s going to do. I can resist that and be miserable, or I can find ways to bring myself back out of the UGH-ness. By balancing my ‘weather crankiness’ with moments of appreciation and awe, I’m preventing negative neural pathways, ones that make me miserable, from strengthening.
The evolutionary bias towards negativity
In evolutionary terms, our default is to be hypervigilant (Velcro) for things that could go wrong and dismissive (Teflon) for things that are going smoothly or even well. That’s because eons ago, if you spent too much time appreciating a beautiful sunset, you were likely to wind up as some lion’s dinner.
Today, as I wrote in the post linked above, the chances of being eaten by a lion are extremely, extremely rare, especially in urban North America. Our brains, though, haven’t really caught up to the conveniences of modern life—including “you’re probably not likely to be eaten by a lion.”
How to course-correct when you’re in rumination
Yesterday, as I felt myself building a case against the weather, I made a decision to do something to help soften the resistance a little bit. I phrase it this way because finding and developing inner peace requires making active decisions to look for the good.
Yesterday morning, I was exercising on the floor of my living room and looking up at the window marred by streaks of seagull shit. And then I noticed something else, behind the seagull shit: Clouds. Moving. Fast.
The constant movement reminded me, as it often does, that everything in this world is impermanent. No matter how bad (or good) things are right now, eventually everything changes. That includes this long, cold spring.
I set up a phone tripod by the window in my office (unsullied by bird poop) and recorded a time-lapse video for 30 minutes. I thought I’d be able to embed the video here, but alas, that’s not an option. Click through that link, though; the time-lapse is pretty awe-some.
Awe is the secret to cutting rumination short
Making the video, and then watching and re-watching it restored my sense of awe, which has been shown to interrupt rumination. I marveled at the clouds streaming across the sky—and across my phone screen. The multiple layers and little strands reminded me that as much as we know, we really know nothing. The video so captivated me that I forgot to be cranky about how cold it was. I just turned on the heat, snuggled up with my cat, and went on with my day.
I’m no Pollyanna. It’s not like the single activity of watching clouds turns me into a happy idiot. Rather, it’s that inner peace takes a lot of freakin’ work and focus, and this is one practice of many. (Here are 5 Ways to Connect More Deeply With Nature, which is also a recipe for short-circuiting rumination.)
In the face of everything happening in the world right now, making a choice to prioritize inner peace is nothing short of revolutionary. Who’s with me?