The quote below struck me because I see this dynamic with my students all the time. Getting young people to quiet down and focus on a primary source from the 18th or 19th century, after lunch let’s say, is not easy. There are strategies to help with this and good teachers utilize them. However, high school students often get lost in the initial attempt to get focused and never get ‘through the gate’ to where their minds are calmer and they are applying their background knowledge and general wisdom to the text, to build meaning. I think many people give up on activities that require sustained focus—like reading—because they don’t often make it ‘through the gate.’ A few years ago the Pew Research Center reported that 23% of American adults hadn’t read a single book in the past year. Americans with ‘a high school degree or less’ were at 39%. Slightly more recent data from the federal government indicates that 51.5% of Americans hadn’t read a book in the previous year.

This inability to continue leaning into something challenging to get through to ‘the focus component’ might also help explain the decline in American’s willingness to prepare food themselves at home. This lands close for me, as I do not enjoy cooking because I find it boring. When I am attempting to cook, I often set up the laptop and listen to YouTube videos. I’d be better served in the long run, if I really wanted to get better at cooking, by focusing on what I am trying to achieve and trying to get into the zone.

I think we all have areas in life where the resistance is hardest and we struggle to get into a focused flow. Maybe it’s reading, or writing, or exercising. Maybe the real challenge is not that we lack focus, but that we don’t give ourselves long enough to reach it. What would change in our lives if we treated that initial restlessness not as a stop sign, but as a doorway?