picture in my mind

Something that stuck in my head from today:

Freedom from want,
is freedom to live.

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On other hilarious news, this happened on tumblr,
and explains a lot of my fangirling:

Feel so validated as an INFP.
INFPs are awesome, yesssss.

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Finished with The Pleasures of Reading in An Age of Distraction;
I tabbed so many pages to save quotes and points, here's one:

There is a kind of attentiveness proper to school, to purposeful learning of all kinds, but in general it is closer to "hyper attention" than to "deep attention". I would argue that even reading for information -- reading textbooks and the like -- does not require extended unbroken focus. It requires discipline but not raptness, I think: the crammer chains himself to the textbook because of time pressures, not because the book itself requires unbroken concentration. Given world enough and time, the harried student could read for a while, do something else, come back and refresh his memory, take another break... but the reader of even the most intellectually demanding work of literary art would lose a great deal by following such tactics. No novel or play or long poem will offer its full rewards to someone who consumes it in small chunks and crumbs. The attention it demands is the deep kind.


The way I see it -- I've always sucked at hyper attention. On reflection of my entire schooling and life before, I realise I'm really quite a terrible student in the traditional sense; I actually really hate sitting down and studying. On the other hand, I only ever succeeded at deep attention in random spurts on random subjects, typically out of my control, haha. So I would get really sucked into something but it would usually be something I didn't need to invest time in (i.e. unrelated to work or school).

Obviously, a smart person would have both types of attention and wield either when necessary.


Oh, here's another quote in the book from David Foster Wallace that seems to address my worry here:

Twenty years after my graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

😱

Ah that delicate balance between flow and control. To be able to exercise some control about what to attend to, and then letting your faculties immerse into deep attention with the chosen subject matter -- is that the goal? Maybe.

It's true right; otherwise, our attentions will forever be swayed by the noise and stimulation that accosts us every day, via our screens especially, and by the outside world. We need to be able to choose what we want to invest time and attention on...