Author: Paula

It was a cold and blustery, yet thor­oughly splen­did fall day when I roun­ded a corner near the mar­ina and saw the man. He crouched slightly at the bot­tom of con­crete stairs, arms ex­ten­ded, el­bows bent and palms fa­cing each oth­er. The most un­usu­al thing was that he re­mained per­fectly still for at least two minutes. He re­minded me of a her­on wait­ing for a fish to spear.

He was at the entry­way of the path I wanted to take so I paused to fig­ure out what was go­ing on. Then, In one flu­id move­ment, he lowered his arms, raised them and jumped lightly onto the six foot con­crete ledge in front of him. The fact that the heels of his feet hung over the edge did noth­ing to hamper him from slowly and grace­fully stand­ing up.

I was awed by his strength and body con­trol. But even more so by his in­tense fo­cus. And he had good reas­on to fo­cus. If his jump had failed, he would have fallen back­wards onto the con­crete, per­haps break­ing his back, head or end­ing his life altogether.

Dumbfounded, I didn’t even see him re­turn to his start­ing po­s­i­tion. But there he was again, crouched at the bot­tom of the stairs with no dis­cern­able signs of movement.

He seemed ob­li­vi­ous to me or any­thing else but I wor­ried about dis­tract­ing him, so slowly con­tin­ued my walk with head tilted down­wards, peek­ing at him from un­der the brim of my hat as he ex­ecuted two more per­fect jumps.

By now, I was close enough to no­tice that he was speak­ing to someone, through Bluetooth ear buds after each jump. Was the per­son on the oth­er end coach­ing him? Or were they a safety link in case he fell?

Later, I wished I’d stopped to talk to him but there was no way I wanted to in­ter­rupt his con­cen­tra­tion. As a writer, I’ve been in a sim­il­ar state a few times — sur­fa­cing from a story to real­ize hours have passed in­stead of five minutes, or to dis­cov­er the faint sound I’d been hear­ing was really a repair­man pound­ing on the door, ir­rit­ated that I wasn’t let­ting him in when he could see me sit­ting at my desk.

Intense fo­cus is not easy to achieve. Especially these days with cell­phones and oth­er devices read­ily to hand. But it’s an art worth achieving.

Check out the up­com­ing November blog to read about cou­gars and fo­cus, as well as sci­en­tific­ally proven ways to gen­er­ate that state of mind.

Photo cred­it Joshua Goddard