Distraction as Salvation

Momentary meetings, short-lived conversations, gestures of comfort and brief connections

Student art at the Royal Academy of Art.

I was working on a Four Somethings newsletter for you this week but kept getting distracted. My heart wasn’t into it and I could not get my head in the game either. There is a lot going on right now, a lot of really hard stuff and I haven’t had much time to focus on anything related to writing except a few time-sensitive things around the publication of my book. I am often distracted and not in the good way but in the head foggy, can’t concentrate, avoidance kind of way. As a master multitasker, and a mother (!) distraction is usually child’s play for me but things (you/me?) change when life throws you soul-crushing, whiplash-inducing curveballs. Thinking about distraction, and being distracted from work, writing and day-to-day life, made me think that there is also a good way to be distracted, a very good way. In the past few months, distraction, what I consider the very best kind of distraction, has also been my salvation.

Research calls it positive distraction, “an adaptive disengagement coping strategy for chronic stressors when controlling for avoidance”. In other words, it is not the avoidance distraction like cleaning the bathroom instead of finishing a deadline (guilty!) but a specific type of disengagement. In parenting literature and mental health resources, the idea of good distraction is often defined as redirection: shifting the focus off of something negative to something positive, engaging in something new including an activity or thought. Simultaneous disengagement and engagement (anew). Perhaps the idea of redirection or re-engagement is at the core of my good distraction recently.

But it is also more than that and almost always influenced by language: the nuanced language people use, the “right things”¹ they say, the messaging about things that perhaps seem frivolous but are sources of comfort and normality, and above all, the conversations with either people that come into my life for a brief moment, or dear friends who know exactly what to say and do to take the focus off something hard or sad.

The last one is a fine balance that can tip at any point and it is hard to write about in real time because someone’s right is another person’s wrong, and not always consistently. We can be hard on the people closest to us. But the conversations with strangers, or the blink-of-an-eye encounters with people that come and go in one’s life especially during a medical crisis is what I am fascinated by. It is disengagement from the bad replaced by a human engagement with touch and talk with people you meet for a moment in your life and may never see again.

In the past few months navigating the medical system far too often than expected, I have been distracted in the best possible ways countless of times. I have bonded with nurses and doctors over Nigerian football players, over stories about Canadian vacations, Finnish names, clogs (!), the broken education system in the UK, upcoming wedding plans and wedding dresses (!) and neighbourhoods that share my name.

Each conversation, every connection and shared laugh over something that matters to the other person, something I ask about and truly find fascinating, has been a saving grace for me. Short-lived conversations and momentary meetings as healing distractions. And of course body language plays a major role: a soft touch, a stranger offering their hand to hold and squeeze, a soft pat on a shoulder, an awkward but necessary hug, a shared laugh or smile. These moments and this language matters more than we imagine but it requires an engagement from both sides. I ask questions about another person because I am genuinely interested and in return, I almost always receive not only a wonderful story about someone’s life, but a comforting distraction from a scary situation and the fear of the unknown.

Flaming June by Frederic, Lord Leighton PRA on display at the Royal Academy of Arts. Yes, this is my mood recently but far less glamorous. It also gives me hope and a longing for beautiful summer dresses, long naps in the sun and time spent by the sea.

I was also going to mention art as distraction as that too has been a saving grace recently but art is more than a distraction. Art is sustenance, a healing balm, and as Anaïs Nin writes, a place to restore our shattered selves.

Thank you for reading. Take care of one another.

1. I can’t tell you exactly what those “right things” are in general because every situation and person is different and what is right for one person or one moment is wrong for another.