What My Dog Knows About Focus That I've Forgotten

We were at a school field tonight, my dog Raffi and I. I kicked a soccer ball and she was gone — locked in, fully committed, every cell pointed at that ball. No pings. No notifications. No ambient awareness of anything else in the universe. Just the ball. I stood there watching her and felt something I did not expect: envy. I cannot remember the last time I was that focused on one thing. Not kind-of-focused while half-listening to a podcast. Not working while glancing at my phone. Actually, completely, embarrassingly focused on a single thing. We have built an entire world designed to prevent that from happening. Every device in my pocket is engineered — by very smart people with very large budgets — to pull my attention somewhere else the moment it settles. The pings and buzzes are not accidents. They are the product. Raffi does not have that problem. When something captures her, she is captured. There is no part of her brain running a background process, half-composing a response to something, half-worrying about something else. She is just there, in the thing, completely. I used to be better at this. I think most of us did, before the devices got so good at fragmenting us. The antidote I keep coming back to is not complicated: breath, stillness, one thing at a time. Mindfulness is an annoying word for a simple idea — you are here, not somewhere else. The soccer ball is the soccer ball. The breath is the breath. I am not there yet. But watching Raffi chase that ball tonight reminded me what it looks like when you actually are. That is worth chasing.