I find myself distracted this week. Distracted to the point of… well, distraction.

I’m not certain why. What I know is that my mind flits from thought to thought to absolutely no thought at all—but not the kind of no thought that is silent calm.

Midway though the week I stopped off at the jigsaw puzzle that occupies a central public space in my office. A coworker was working on the puzzle, and I needed a break. I was there for about 30 minutes, but it took at least the first 5 minutes, and maybe 10, for me to settle in and focus enough to work on the puzzle. I kept looking at the pieces, looking at the puzzle, and not being able to connect the two. Eventually I realized I wasn’t actually seeing the pieces—the individual pieces, that is. I was just glancing, scanning, not really even thinking about them, just half-focusing on them as props. I consciously made myself focus and think about what would be needed to match them up with one another to piece together into parts of the puzzle, and then I was able to work the puzzle.

My focus lasted less than 30 minutes, though. Once I found myself again not looking and thinking, I walked away and back to my desk. I was able at that point to focus again on my work, but still in an agitated way. Focusing, but still distracted at the core.

The puzzle feels like a metaphor for life, but I haven’t been able to piece that together.

Last night

Last night I went to my first holiday gathering of the winter holiday season we used to call the Christmas season. My book club’s holiday party consists of food and drink and socializing and the reading aloud of poems. It’s a lovely tradition that was underway long before I joined the group, and I’m happy every year to be a part of it. Not everyone loves poetry, and I suspect not everyone in my book group loves poetry. But poems are short, and reading aloud and being read to are a kind of communion we don’t experience much as adults. We connect with one another by sitting quietly and listening, really listening, while someone reads to us something they’ve chosen specifically to share with this group. For me, it’s calming and centering, and for a brief time it gave me back a focus I’d been lacking all week.

I took advantage of the others’ patience and kindness and read two poems, both by poets I discovered in the past year: Andrea Gibson and Elizabeth Acevedo. I read the poem “Titanic,” from Gibson’s book Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns, and while I can’t find a recording on YouTube of Gibson performing it I just found the poet’s performance of another poem, “Living Proof,” and I beg you to listen to it because it just took my breath away:

The second poem I shared was “Spoken Word,” from Acevedo’s book The Poet X. Again, I can’t find a recording of her reading it, so here’s “Medea”:

Loverly

I just mis-typed the word lovely as loverly. And even while correcting my typo, I fell in lover with the mistake. I’m lovering it so much, and it has distracted me so much, that I have to share it with you: Loverly.

Even my reading seems distracted

Do I still seem distracted to you? I do to me.

Here’s another sample of my distraction, and I’ve no idea whether this is cause or symptom: I have several different reading projects underway simultaneously, and at any given time in between books I have trouble deciding which path I want to be on. I’m simultaneously trying to focus my reading on all of these lists:

• Books my son read in high school and left behind with notes in the margins
• Books I read about first on Escape Into Life
• This year’s National Book Award winners
• Books I picked up at a recent indie book fair
• The books I’ve borrowed from the library, which include titles from two of the four lists above but also titles that just distracted me into checking them out
• Other books—newly loaned to me by friends, for example, or pulled from the pile by my bedside

These lists overlap and intermingle. With any book, I could be working on one or two separate lists. Which means that this activity that should help me center and calm and focus, this activity we call reading, has in fact turned into multi-tasking, which is in itself distracting.

So I come full circle. From distraction to distraction, with stops in between for moments of centering, but always it seems back to distraction. Now I must go walk my dog and…

SQUIRREL!