“What techniques do you use to come back to focus when you’re in a scattered state?”, Kyle asked this morning as we walking into the city.

I realised that I don’t have a good answer, I don’t have strong habits for focus. I know that walking helps me focus, yet outside of ’the walk’ I don’t make a great showing on that front, through the winter it is common for me to spend the whole day sitting down. In many ways I treat focused days like random happen-stance, not something I can cultivate, which feels… embarrassingly passive.

Craig writes a lot about cultivating focus, most recently in his About a Nightingale pop-up newsletter,

And you have to fight to create this time. Life (now more than ever given current events and global chaos) conspires to steal from you days and hours and years to “work.” Conspires to steal from you the ability to hone that “fullness meter” in your heart or brain or wherever it lives. There’s a story I love about Murakami Haruki (don’t know if it’s entirely true, but it’s definitely partly true): For most of his adult life he went to bed at nine p.m. no matter what was going on. If he was doing a book signing — goodbye at 9 p.m.! For him, fullness was to be pulled from his morning work (and morning run), and fullness was critically maintained by doing it over and over and over again. He knew that whatever “pleasures” awaited him after nine p.m. (believe me, there aren’t any), they didn’t compare to the fullness of his work. This may sound pathological or nuts or like he’s “missing out on life” but … you can’t argue with the output. This is how the work is done. By going to the mat for it in unexpected, seemingly petty ways, in protecting it from death by a billion paper cuts of one more whiskey or: sure, I’ll just go with the flow today. (The flow will always be there for you.) […]

But this is the crux of creative work and keeping it going sustainably — as you become more and more “famous,” and as opportunities multiply, you lose the ability to commit the time to the work like you could when you were younger. I find the most inspiring and successful artists are those who have protected and continued to nurture whatever it is they find as the source of their “work” and fullness, no matter how “busy” they get or how many excuses they have to do something else. (Or how offended someone might be if you just get up and go to bed at nine p.m.)

In front of me is a long white desk with four Scandinavian-style wooden chairs with thin blue-vinyl seat cushions. Kyle said he uses a technique akin to that used by people having anxiety attacks: notice and describe the world around you. Since arriving at the library I’ve lost focus again, so lets try this.

At the far edge of the desk (about 60cm away) is a 30cm tall sheet of frosted glass that separates this desk from an identical one mirrored on the other side, so that we sit as a row of four facing an opposing row of four.

For some time there have been three of us sat on each side of the table, but one man is just leaving, so we are five on this island now. There are 6 of these mirrored islands, 48 identical places, 31 are occupied. In almost every occupied place a laptop sits before a person who hunches over it, as though whispering to one another. Seeing this reminds me tuck my chair in and straighten my back. We all stare into these screens, pour ourselves into these screens, and in turn we develop eye fatigue and social anxiety. These computers have apparently made as both the laziest and most-productive generation in the history of the world.

Against the West wall (truthfully it is the North-West wall) beneath 22 tall windows there are 12 yellow armchairs where people mostly read.

A small lamp hangs over each desk. Most of them are switched off but where they are on they resemble the reading lights on airplanes, with their very focused beam which seems to apologise for being even gently visible to anyone but the occupant of it’s accompanying seat. Sitting here thinking about airplanes I start to feel sleepy, and the air seems to take on that stale quality that is unique to the recycled air in the cabin of a long-haul flight. To think people used to smoke on planes.

The ceiling is gently curved, as though we were sitting in the attic conversion of a large airplane hanger. Two cylindrical light fixtures run the full length of the room and cast their light upwards so that in reflecting off the white painted concrete it is diffused. The room is quiet save for the tapping of keys, the turning of pages, and the intro to a podcast which played loudly a few moments ago when someone accidentally played it through their laptop speakers instead of their headphones and a dozen people turned to see if this was an ‘anti-social’ ding-dong come to ruin all our days, or just someone making a mistake they’re going to be anxiously replaying in their heads for the next 45 minutes. To everyone’s relief it was the latter.

I don’t think I’m coming back to focus, but hey, if nothing else I’m glad to have this description of a single room on the 8th floor of Vancouver’s Central Library.