It feels like lately that my concentration has been nearly non-existent. I'm not really sure when it started, but for awhile now I've had a really hard time keeping to a single task or even thought. Instead I find my mind wandering off without warning. Now I've always been a bit of a day dreamer. Ever since I was a child I would go off into my head at various times. I think part of that was spending nearly my first ten years as an only child in a somewhat rural neighborhood. I wouldn't say I was isolated, but there was certainly a feeling of isolation at times. In that it became necessary to create your own fun. When some people are bored they let themselves get into trouble and I'm sure my parents would say that I was no different from other children, where if I was left to my own devices for too long, would eventually find something I wasn't supposed to be doing. Even still, I tended to entertain myself by using my imagination. Don't get me wrong, I loved television and games and toys. There were times though where there was no one to play with and nowhere to go so unless you wanted to sit in the dark and go slowly insane, you found something to occupy yourself. So it became second nature to go inside my head when the world got boring.
I never went to pre-school so kindergarten was a totally new experience to me. Up until then I stayed home with my mom and my interactions with other kids, or even other forms of authority were very limited. During my year in kindergarten I spent a lot of time in trouble. Part of that was because I hopelessly bored with the structure of school. If you can remember kindergarten, then you know that the term structure is used very loosely. Now I won't go so far as to say that I'm a genius or anything, but my mom spent a lot of time preparing me for school without my knowledge. The alphabet, numbers, colors, and all the little things are covered in kindergarten were old news to me by the time I actually went to school. So that meant while they were going over what comes after S, I was at my desk thinking of something fun in my head. Being a five year old I had very little self control, which isn't all that different from how I am now. Eventually I figured out how to keep having fun, but do it in such a way that I took fewer trips to the principal's office. At some point I was tested and put into an additional class called Gifted & Talented. While most of the other kids were doing reading comprehension or whatever, I went to the annex building where a small group of children had separate study. At first this was great because we covered all sorts of things that would have never been taught in regular class. Eventually though I became bored with it and returned to normal classes. Still for a time it was a great mental playground for me.
As an adult things have changed a lot and yet somehow stayed the same. When I'm bored I sink into my head as a form of escape from the mundane. I think that's why I like movies and books so much. They create a world where just about anything is possible. Someone out there also has a wild imagination and the ability to share it with others. Lately though even movies and books are having trouble holding my attention for too long. I wonder if part of that has been contributed by how our society is slowly moving towards information overload. When I was young I did one thing at a time. If you were watching television then that's what you were doing. You may listen to music while reading or playing, but for the most part life was mostly single threaded. These days we tend to take on multiple things at once. How many people turn the television on, do homework, surf the web, talk on the phone, or do various chores around the house. We no longer do just one thing. We try to do everything. Before if you focused on a single task then you knew other things had to wait in line. By doing that we could devote ourselves to that one thing. Now as we try to do several things at once we split our focus among a bunch of different tasks and ultimately commit to nothing. Add to that it's almost becoming expected that everyone move to this way of thinking. The world is moving so fast that unless you're covering five different things at once, you're going to get left behind. The problem that comes from that is when we're forced to revert back to a single task our minds want to keep going in several different directions at once.
So these days I find my mind wandering. It's not normally to anything specific, but rather just some random thought. This happens all the time now. In fact it just happened as I was writing this. For a minute or two I wasn't here. I couldn't even tell you where I went or what I was thinking about. I just know that I wasn't on point for a moment. Part of me wonders if a lack of concentration comes from something not being fulfilled. Or maybe there are unresolved issues that the brain is trying to work on. It could just be that boredom has set in and in an attempt to fight off sleeping, the mind randomly grabs some thought or memory and runs with it for a little while. Most of the time I'm not really satisfied with right now. I'm thinking about what I'm going to do next or what I've already done. Then the present is gone and the realization that it was used to think about some other time than right now sinks in, which just perpetuates the cycle further. So if you're talking to me and it looks like I might be drifting off, don't take it personal, my mind is doing its own thing and hasn't informed me about where we're going next.
