Why Be Mindful of All the Distractions?

When you’re distracted, you become disempowered and cede control of your life.Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

It’s easy to get overwhelmed. The biggest downside of the information age, the internet, and social media, is how much junk is out there to distract you.

This, coupled with the inherent fear-base of our society, is being increasingly weaponized to cause chaos, misguidance, and disempower the masses. It’s gotten to the point where there are distractions from the distractions.

All of this is designed to move you further and further away from self-awareness. Why? Because the more those in power can keep average people off balance, the more they can influence and control the masses in abstract ways.

The entire MAGA movement is one giant distraction. It focuses entirely on blaming this, that, or the other thing, and taking ZERO responsibility or accountability for anything. The leaders play on the fears, hopes, and dreams of people in subtle and unsubtle ways. That’s why they treat “wokeness” as a bad thing. Because being awake, aware, and “woke” means you can see where responsibility and accountability should be.

The biggest issue with this is finding the middle ground between knowing and becoming overwhelmed.

Knowledge is power, but empowerment is more important

Unless you’re a sociopath, you have a desire to help people in the world. That might extend only as far as immediate circles you can physically access, or it might reach out to abstracts in the world at large. To be a productive, useful human being capable of helping yourself and others requires both inner and outer awareness.

Too often, we put greater emphasis on knowledge without. School is about learning history, how systems work, interaction with others, and various outside matters. This is important because you don’t live in a vacuum, and other people matter just as much as you do.

However, you have zero control over anything outside of yourself. None whatsoever. You might have some sway, input, and influence, but that’s incredibly limited. For that reason, you only need enough information and knowledge of what’s happening outside yourself to make choices in elections, boycott terrible businesses, avoid warzones, and the like.

I am not dismissing education and learning. The more you learn, the more you open neural pathways to increase your ability to learn things. That’s important. The trouble is when you sacrifice giving time and energy to inner knowledge.

You alone know what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, what your intentions are, the positivity or negativity of your approach to things, and your actions. Nobody outside of you can know or control this. With this knowledge, you can control how you live your life via all the choices and decisions that you make.

This is where active conscious awareness comes in. Mindfulness is being present, here and now, and making active choices and decisions.

Which is challenging when you have all these distractions.

Why be mindful of all the distractions?

Here are a couple of hard truths. You can’t do anything directly or immediately about the destructive actions of Trump and his administration, the media allowing politicians to dictate free speech, Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, Netanyahu and his government’s handling of Palestine, or the like. There is nothing you can do, directly, about these matters.

Yes, there are indirect things you can do. This includes voting people out of office, campaigning for better people, protesting, boycotting, and sharing ideas via blogs and social media. They are good and useful things to do, too. That, however, is about all that you can do for these matters.

Yet all these overwhelming things are in your face 24/7. Everywhere you turn, there’s an advertisement, a scathing article about atrocities, commentary both wise and foolish, and so much more. And all of these are distractions that are meant to disempower you.

Photo by Max van den Oetelaar on Unsplash

When you focus on things you have no control over, you cede what you can control. Namely, your life experiences. When you let your subconscious mind swim in the distractions of the world, unchecked, you become disenchanted, disturbed, unsettled, angry, scared, uncertain, and all sorts of other disempowering emotions.

It’s all too easy to let the distractions take you away from being mindful and employing active conscious awareness. When you’re mindful, you can see the distractions for what they are. Then you can dismiss them via the choices and decisions you consciously make.

Important note

I am not in any way advocating for toxic positivity, shutting yourself away from the news, or being oblivious to world affairs. If you don’t know what’s happening out there, you can’t do anything in any way to change it for the better.

However, when it consumes you, leaves you enraged and dreading what’s next, what can you do via your hyperfocus on it? Nothing. Knowing every single detail of the latest awfulness from the administration, business world, or foreign war doesn’t empower you to do anything about it. It distracts you from choices and decisions that you do have at your fingertips.

Disempowering yourself by letting the distractions rule your life helps nobody and leaves you without any fuel to do anything for anyone. Ultimately, this is why it’s important to be mindful of the distractions.

Recognize and acknowledge the distractions

To be mindful of the distractions out there, you need to first recognize them. See them there, pulling your attention away from the things in your life you can do something about.

Then, acknowledge them. Recognition without acknowledgement leaves the distractions running in the background. Recognition is like seeing that the TV is on, even though nobody is watching it, at full volume. Acknowledgement is grabbing the remote and choosing to switch it off.

Finding the balance between knowing and being overwhelmed is up to you. My threshold is not yours, and vice versa. But when you’re mindful of the distractions, you can shift from allowing your subconscious to soak it all up unchecked to consciously moving past them via the choices and decisions you make.

This is your superpower, and it empowers you. When you’re empowered, you gain control of your life experiences. That opens you to new ideas, potential, and possibilities. I don’t know about you, but that’s preferable to expecting nothing but doom and gloom.

Lastly, it is in no way, shape, or form selfish. If you don’t make choices and decisions for how to live your life, who does? Your life is yours. When you’re empowered, you gain what control you can and open yourself to see beyond distractions.

Do you see why it matters to be mindful of all the distractions?

This is the seventh-hundred-eighteenth (718) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to repost and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.

The post Why Be Mindful of All the Distractions? appeared first on The Ramblings of the Titanium Don.