The Guinea Pig Diaries (20 page)

This, I figure, is Extreme Focus.

I find a sofer on the Internet and dial him up. I put the phone to my ear and shut my eyes. That’s how I’m talking on the phone nowadays. I’m a Blind Caller. Remember those Mesozoic days when people actually sat and talked on the phone—just talked? I’m trying to re-create that. The key is to close the eyes and remove temptation. So much less stressful. It’s a blissful freedom
from choice that leads to phone conversations with actual substance.

He answers. I explain my project.

“I’m Xeroxing something,” he says. “Can I call you back in five minutes?”

An hour later, my cell phone chimes.

“Okay, that was more than five minutes. I don’t know if you work in an office where you have to go somewhere to . . .” He pauses. “Come in!” Another pause. “Oh, I need to sign this. Okay, the signature here?

“I’m going to put the phone down for one minute,” Neil says.

In the background, I hear shuffling.

“Have you seen my calendar downstairs?” Neil shouts to someone.

Hmm. Is this the right man to talk to about sustained focus?

Twenty minutes and several interruptions later, we’ve arranged to meet next Monday at the Applejack Diner in mid-town.

Neil looks a bit like a yarmulke-clad Harvey Fierstein. He’s wearing a striped blue shirt and a gray vest. A former advertising man, he became a scribe twenty-five years ago. And his handwriting is beautiful. When he writes down my address to send me a book, it appears on the page full of swirls and flourishes. My ZIP code looks as elegant as the Preamble to the Constitution.

It takes him up to a year to write a Torah, working ten hours a day. Has his head hit the board from exhaustion? Yes. But he does love it. “When the scribe is not present, the letter is not alive. It just becomes a series of strokes.”

When I ask him how he keeps from being bored, he shows
me by taking out a calligraphy pen and a piece of paper. Each letter can be viewed from a thousand different angles. The shape of the letters—the slender, graceful Italian style or the blockier Czech look. You can think of the frequency the letters appear in. Or how the letter relates to its original pictogram. He speaks quickly, excitedly.

That’s the secret to getting into the state of flow—being totally in love with your topic. I remember I once met an ornithologist who was visiting my grandfather’s house. The man stood at the back door with a stoned-like smile on his face for an hour, just watching the birds.

I’m not in a state of flow. I’m battling a nasty cold, and can barely keep my eyelids from drooping as Neil talks about the personality of the different letters. I tune out, coming in occasionally to hear things like “The orange juice
is
there,
was
there, and always
will
be there.”

To keep myself engaged, I ask him another question: How do you keep from making errors?

“You can’t think about it. You’re going to mess up. So what? You start over. If you want to avoid making a mistake, you cannot try to avoid making a mistake. You just have to forget about it.”

I know what he means. It’s a strange tic of our brain. Sometimes, the more goal-oriented we are, the
less likely
we are to attain that goal. If you really, really want something, you have to forget how much you want it. Or else you’ll be too nervous to get it. But dear Lord, that’s a cruel and paradoxical system evolution has devised.

And it invades even the lowliest of human endeavors. If I’m standing next to my boss at the urinal and really want to pee, I can’t think about peeing. If I say, “Okay, now pee,” I’ll be standing
there till the building closes down. I have to think about, say, the color of the wall. Sometimes, it seems, you can pay too much attention.

A week ago, Julie and I went to see
Doubt.
And Philip Seymour Hoffman’s charismatic priest (who may or may not have done something horrible) teaches the basketball team how to toss a free throw. He says you can’t think about throwing the free throw, or you’ll get too nervous. You have to have a routine. Bend your knees. Bounce the ball twice. Whatever it is, do it every time. And you’ll be thinking of your routine and you’ll forget to be nervous.

Sometimes, you have to focus on the trees, not the forest.

BOUNDARIES

My cell phone rings. It’s my mom.

“A.J., I’m trying to buy Julie a present for—”

“Can I call you back?”

She seems a little put out. I usually talk to her, seeing as I’m not an air traffic controller and can take a couple of minutes out of my day.

“It’s just that these are work hours,” I explain.

It’s two-thirty in the afternoon and I’m trying to be one of the only people in America who still works a nine-to-five job. I want to work, then stop. I don’t punch a clock, but I do jot down my starting and ending time.

“I’ll call you at five-fifteen.”

Maggie Jackson, the author of
Distracted,
says it’s essential to set borders around work. She does it physically, by sitting down, stretching her arms, and saying to herself, Okay, this is work time.

I call back at five-fifteen. Then Julie and I have dinner. Then I go back to work at eight-thirty. Workaholism is a hard disease to cure.

THE WISDOM OF GURU BILL MURRAY

I am in line at the corner deli to buy a Diet Coke. So naturally, I say to myself, “I’m waiting in line to buy a Diet Coke.” I speak it out loud, as confidently as I can.

The guy in front of me—wearing a CBS Sports hat—swivels his head.

“I’m looking around the store,” I continue. “I see a stack of oranges and bananas.”

He looks at my head for an earpiece. Maybe a Bluetooth headset to reassure himself that I’m on the phone. Nope. I’m just talking to myself.

“And now I’m getting my wallet out of my pants.”

He looks at me like, well, like he’s just seen a child vomit into an Easter basket.

It’s all part of my new strategy for unitasking. It’s a strange one, but it does have scientific backing. I call it the Bill Murray Method of Extreme Focus.

Maybe you remember the scene in
Caddyshack?
The one in which Murray’s whackjob, gopher-hunting greenskeeper pretends to be playing golf. He’s got a gardening tool and he’s thwacking these fancy white flowers outside the clubhouse, sending the petals spraying. All the while, he’s also pretending to be a sportscaster covering the event. He’s providing his own real-time color commentary:

“Incredible Cinderella story. This unknown, comes out of nowhere, to lead the pack at Augusta . . . [thwacks a flower] . . .
The normally reserved Augusta crowd, going wild . . . he’s gonna hit about a five iron it looks like. He’s got a beautiful backswing [thwack] . . . oh, he got all of that one! He’s got to be pleased with that . . . [thwack] It looks like a mirac—IT’S IN THE HOLE! IT’S IN THE HOLE! Former greenskeeper, now Masters champion.

After I saw
Caddyshack
when I was twelve, I started to do the same thing whenever I played sports by myself (which was my preferred way to play sports, since it cut down on the chances of losing). “Jacobs bounces the ball. He shoots! He scores! Un-bah-liev-able!”

I liked the idea of a crowd cheering me on. It jacked up the excitement. So I started to expand the self-narration to other activities. Why should sports have all the fun? “Jacobs has the Tater Tot in sight,” I’d say when eating at the brown Formica table at the cafeteria. “He spears it with his fork. Jim, will you look at that? Exquisite form. He is a master. Down goes that Tater Tot! Down goes the Tater Tot!”

I weaned myself from sportscasting my own life in high school. But now, during Project Focus, I’ve brought it back with force. Well, at least a version of it. I’ve cut down on the “crowd goes wild” and I’ve switched from “Jacobs” to first person. But I’m narrating my own existence.

If I go to the bathroom, I say, “I’m going to the bathroom.” I know I sound like Rain Man. But I’m telling you, it’s changed my life.

First, it’s a good torch to keep away the multitasking monsters. If I start to absentmindedly multitask, I’ll be the first to know. No secrets from myself.

But more than that, it’s Buddhist enlightenment by way of Bob Costas. More specifically:

• It forces you to live a mindful life. You are present. “I am walking through Central Park. I’m in the middle of a crowded city, and I can barely see the buildings, barely hear the traffic, just trees and jutting rocks and grass. Amazing.” It makes me thankful for nature and New York and Frederick Law Olmsted. When I interview attention researcher Meredith Minear from the College of Idaho, she says I stumbled onto an ancient technique. Part of the reason that evolution developed vocalizing was to hone our attention.

• It helps balance your emotions. The very act of saying “I’m angry” makes you less angry. It lights up the language centers in the brain, which are in the more evolved cerebral cortex, which allows you to better control yourself. When you label something, you gain a level of mastery over it. You’ll still be pissed, you may still want to smack that person with numchucks, but you’ll have a little distance and perspective.

• It tips you off to warped thinking. The other day, Julie told me she left her
New York
magazine in one of the suitcases she took on a weekend trip, but she couldn’t remember which. I searched the first, then the second, then the third. I found the magazine in the third suitcase. “Of course, it’s in the third,” I said out loud. “That’s my luck.” I paused. “Actually, maybe that’s not my luck. I learned from my Rationality Project, my luck is average. It’s just that I remember the unlucky incidents more often.”

“I’m bringing you the
New York
magazine,” I said.

“I see that,” Julie said.

“I’m handing it to you, my wife, and then I’m going to leave the room.”

“Thanks for the update!”

“I’m noticing the painting in our living room for the first time in two years. It’s nice and bright and yellow.”

“Good to know.”

She’d already started to read the magazine.

VIRTUAL SITTING

Yesterday, I made a crucial discovery: Wii Fit offers a meditation video game. A video game! And here I had been trying to do it in real life without electronic equipment, like some loser from the eighth century.

The “game” is called “Lotus Focus,” and the idea is to watch a pixellated candle flicker onscreen while you are sitting on a Wii sensor board. And then continue sitting really still. If you move, you lose.

I crossed my legs, sat down, and pressed start. Forty-three seconds later, I must have shifted a butt muscle. The game finished with a curt sayonara.

Until they add a secret trapdoor where you can enter an opium den and flirt with geisha girls, Lotus Focus is probably not going to outsell
Grand Theft Auto IV.
It’s basically a really expensive version of Statues—a “game” my mom made us play at my seventh birthday when we kids got too rowdy. Same goal: stay really still. At least Statues had candy prizes involved at the end. (Incidentally, I found out the ultimate cheat on Lotus Focus. I packed up a suitcase with books and put it on the Wii sensor board. Can’t get much stiller. A winner every time! What is the sound of one hand high-fiving, suckah?)

So Wii is not the path to enlightenment. I’m going to have to keep meditating without electronic devices. Which is why, for half an hour each night, I’ve been sitting on some scrunched-up
pillows, lowering my lids to half-mast, cupping my hands in my lap, and trying to do it old school.

The first four or five times I thought I might die of boredom. I fell asleep twice, once with my eyes open. I also tipped backward once, just about banging my head on a bookshelf. (Business idea: meditation helmets.)

I read a knee-high stack of meditation books. I was doing all different styles—Samatha, Vipassana. Eyes open, closed, half-mast. I chanted in Hindi, in English. (“Don’t worry, be happy,” one book recommended.) I paid attention to my breath as it entered my nostrils and filled my lungs. I bought a book called
8 Minute Meditation.
Eight minutes! You can get washboard abs and become a bodhisattva with the exact same daily time commitment.

I read one book that said the key to meditation is to remember it isn’t passive. It’s hard work. Aha! This shifted my whole paradigm. It’s basically working on your brain like a muscle. Meditation is free weights for my prefrontal cortex. I’m going to be the Mr. Universe of brains.

It’s all about maintaining focus. You focus on something— your breath, your mantra, a soft-boiled egg—and if your mind wanders, you yank it back. It’s a death match between your focus and your brain’s desire to go gallivanting.

I meditated like I was going into combat. I will squash extraneous thoughts! That lasted a week, until I realized that’s too violent. That’s not Zen. I’m being pathetically Western.

You have to “gently and without judgment” guide your thoughts back to your breath. If I’m going to go with a sports metaphor, I’ll go with surfing, which seems appropriately Californian. The mind has plenty of churning whitecaps. But you just need to stay above them. You watch your thoughts pass by as if you’re watching a boat glide in the distance. Oh, look, now
I’m thinking about how I’m older than Sherman McCoy, the Master of the Universe character in
The Bonfire of the Vanities,
and how ancient he seemed when I first read that book. Okay. Well, so be it. Now focus again on the breathing.

Nowadays, when my alarm chimes after half an hour of meditating, I emerge in one of two states. Either I’m calm, serene, and sharp-minded, and feel as if I’ve just taken a run around the reservoir, but without having to put on sneakers or sweat. Or else I’m calm, serene, and befuddled, as if my brain has been soaking in some thick clam chowder.

So is it working? Are my focusing muscles getting buff? As novice as my meditation skills are, it does seem to help me in real life, at least a little. When I’m sitting at my desk, I’m much more quick to notice when my attention starts to wander. Where you going? Get back here, you big lug. I firmly but kindly pull the leash back to, say, my article on Mike Huckabee for
Esquire.