Steve Andreas > Books Authored > Six Blind Elephants > Chapter 7
Steve Andreas > Books Authored > Six Blind Elephants > Chapter 7 | |
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A smaller scope is simply the reverse of going to a larger scope, reducing the amount of information. A smaller scope allows us to attend more fully to what remains.
For example, some years ago, some friends of mine were remodeling their kitchen. They had torn out the hood that vented smoke and fumes from the stove out of the house, leaving a ragged hole in the wall, with some ugly scrapes, grease stains, dirt and cobwebs. They had an elegant gold leaf picture frame in a closet, and when they placed it over the hole, it suddenly became a very interesting abstract composition that wouldnt have been out of place in a museum. The frame reduced the scope, changing a scruffy piece of wall into a work of art, a very different category.
Earlier I asked you to imagine being in a small space, with nothing else nearby, and notice your feelings as you expanded your scope to include familiar surroundings, family and friends. If you imagine being in that larger scope and then shrink it down until you are alone, your change in categorization and response would also reverse. If your family and friends are supportive, you might feel lonely when you made the scope smaller, but if they are intrusive and unpleasant, you might feel safer and more relaxed when you are alone.
Reducing scope is particularly useful when you want to sleep, or enjoy a pleasant sensual experience, undistracted by other events around you, whether real or imagined. It is also very useful when you want to stay focused on accomplishing something important, and you need to temporarily exclude other important concerns or irritating distractions. By deliberately excluding information that is irrelevant for your immediate outcome, you can give it your undivided attention and accomplish more.
Whenever someone says that they are overwhelmed by events, that is a clear indication that they need to reduce the amount of information that they are attempting to process. Reducing their scope of attention in space and/or time can reduce the amount of information and make it manageable.
Often it is very helpful to literally push away the overwhelming images, making them smaller and farther away, giving you space to decide which parts of it really need your attention and which parts can be dealt with later, or perhaps even ignored permanently.
For instance, this morning while proofreading, I was distracted by images of some things that I need to do later in the day. These images were in my head, so I imagined pushing them out to the side, first left and then right, then behind. This helped a little, and behind was a little better than the sides, but they were still distracting. When I tried to push them out to the front, that made them even more distracting. When I pushed them up out of the top of my head, they became smaller, colorless, silent, and much less distracting.
Slowing the tempo of time is another way to make it easier to process events, because that gives you more time to respond to them. Slowing time is similar to using a microscope, which both reduces the scope that you are attending to, and at the same time making that scope larger, more detailed, and easier to see.
When we face overwhelm, it makes sense to decrease scope, as long as we periodically scan what we are omitting, to be sure that we arent missing something important to us. When our lives are complex or we have too much to think about, its very important to limit what we have to deal with, and this can be very useful, particularly if it is temporary.
When someone is doing a task that will take some time to accomplish, they often compare what they have already done with how much is left to do, become discouraged, and stop. If they use a smaller scope, they can set a small goal for the next moment, few minutes or half-hour, and at the end of that period they can compare what they have accomplished with the goal they set themselves. That is much more likely to result in a positive feeling of accomplishment, and continued motivation.
For instance, while writing this book I am focused on the small task that I am working on at the moment, whether that is writing, editing, or deciding where a piece of writing ought to go. With this narrow scope, each word that appears on the screen gives me a small feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction at the progress I have made. I feel this even when I write something and then change it or delete it because I want to say it differently, because that is also a small bit of progress. When I explained this process to a friend once, he looked amazed, and said, Thats cheating! It may be cheating, but it works. For more on sustained motivation, see (4, ch. 15).
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