Of Jonathon Franzen, Loneliness, and The Still Point of Attention …

It requires skill to craft tantalizing titles, and taglines that coax readers, even those who receive your blogs as I do those written by The Mommy Psychologist, to actually stop what we are doing, and take in the blogger’s words.

That what we read leaves us thinking, and pondering the subject of their website and blogs, which for The Mommy Psychologist is the whole gambit of parenting in the 21st century, evidences grasp of an art.

Readers can be grateful when the very topic of a blogger’s discussion plunges a reader into exploring the overall subject of her or his posts, that topic for which the blogger has established her or himself as a thought leader, or works toward.

When a blogger accomplishes this in a way that catalyzes a reader to examine said topic–in this case parenting–from a stance that is personal and intimate, and that provokes the reader to gain more insight into her or himself, along with yielding objective and didactic information about said topic, we are blessed.

Intense absorption with our own thoughts feelings parallels, if not rides upon the back of narcissism.

And yet our culture, American society holds and presents many psychological pitfalls.

Maneuvering and matriculating through our culture resembles, if not mimics, treading the slippery slope of a minefield.

Miss one step and disaster manifests.

What do I mean by the end?

Abrupt transition, loss of what was one’s previous role and place in the lives of those with whom we live and work while propelled into an existence of social isolation–the phenomenon that has become the apartheid of America.

We are frantic in our efforts to avoid becoming too busy with ourselves, consumed and subsumed in the wilderness of our loneliness, the still point of our existence, the root of our isolation–dismemberment from our true identity, who we truly are, the undiscovered self who lies hidden, if not stands in the back of the secret armoire of our hearts.

Beneath this lies our soul aching, yearning to but only connect.

Author, Lev Grossman,  writes of Jonathon Franzen, in Jonathon Franzen: Great American Novelist, and the author’s desire for, ” …  novels to survive … There are any number of reasons. … The way Franzen thinks about it is that books can do things, socially useful things, that other media can’t. He cites — as one does — the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his idea of busyness: that state of constant distraction that allows people to avoid difficult realities and maintain self-deceptions. With the help of cell phones, e-mail and handheld games, it’s easier to stay busy, in the Kierkegaardian sense, than it’s ever been. Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. “We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we’ve created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful,” Franzen says. ‘The place of stillness that you have to go to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.‘”

Attention.

Stillness.

Without one the other cannot exist; each operating inextricably bound to the other.

And so it is that in the stillness of bringing attention to ourselves, outside the circumspection of media, and absent the prying and eager eyes of others, we come to know ourselves.

And in this self-knowledge, our understanding of the person who lives within, we develop empathy.

But empathy bolstered by the quality of compassion towards others.  And in this abode we stand ready to approach the eternal flame which ignites the spark of altruism, the offering of ourselves and our energies to others without concern or attachment to results.