Note from Louisa

This weekend, I had some unexpected down time and sat down to watch one of my favorite movies, a poignant foreign film that explores the celebration of life by embracing the rituals of death. It is a deeply moving narrative made even more immersive by the need to read the English subtitles in order to follow along.
 
As “Departures” is a Japanese film (winner of the 2009 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film), it’s not easy to find on your typical streaming service. As a result, I watched on an ad-supported platform. While I am grateful that such platforms exist and provide free content that is difficult to access elsewhere, I must admit to being a bit out of practice with the intrusion of commercials. I’ve watched this film several times in the past, and was interrupted multiple times at each viewing, but this most recent experience was exceptional. As it turns out, it was also sadly instructive regarding the nature of attention in day-to-day life.
 
It is striking and even a bit violent to be enthralled by the incredible work of so many artists steeping themselves in a challenging and beautiful story about the preciousness of life, only to find a critical apex of quiet, affective tension interrupted by a loud, upbeat, vibrantly colored, chaotic scene from a cereal commercial. It was insanely jarring and reminded me of the funeral I attended some year ago where someone’s cell phone rang out during a moving eulogy with the dulcet tones of “Booti Call”. 
 
Sometimes, these moments can provide some much-needed humor or relief, but I also believe that they are intrusions into the essential work we must do to develop our capacity to stay with strong emotions and difficult topics, such as grief and loss.


The greatest commodity of present life is not money. It’s time. And our capacity to fully leverage this finite resource is dependent on our ability to stay present. If you will, time = attention, or where we place our attention is how we spend our ever-fleeting time on the planet. Yet, in modern culture, we are constantly being interrupted. Our attention has been monetized, commodified, and cheapened down to algorithms and revenue projections.
 
Our bodies respond to the buzz of the text alert with the same urgency and need to act that was once reserved for the siren of a passing ambulance. Our sympathetic nervous systems, designed to be the infrequently accessed resource to help us evade danger, are now experiencing “fight or flight” as a normative endocrinological state.

It will take a concentrated effort for us to reverse this trend and steady our ability to remain present and unaffected by the insistence of the culture to cause us to miss our lives.
 
This is the time to develop or strengthen our practices, whether they are meditation, prayer, creative practices, or somatic in nature. The siren of distraction is strong. Resist them or risk losing your life.
 
“May you be rocked, as deeply as necessary and as gently as possible” ~Anonymous

Louisa