The Power of Focus

When you’re taking family pictures, you want to have a clear, sharp focus. Today’s digital cameras – even our smartphones – make this easier than ever before. But for now, let’s talk about the importance of focus in everyday life.

Most of us live in a culture that presents us with a bewildering array of options. The confusion of too many options will largely disappear once you know how to focus. In this sense, focus means concentrating all of your attention on one particular thing. As we do with a camera lens, our focus brings a situation into sharp relief in order to clarify our relationship with it.

When we concentrate our attention on a particular endeavor, problem or person, we bring all our energy to it, shutting out irrelevant details. Even if we find ourselves caught in a crisis, where our attention seems to be demanded everywhere at once, when we choose to focus our attention on one aspect of the problem, a solution becomes much easier. A natural progression then begins to unfold, making it possible for us to arrive, eventually, at overall resolution.

Remember, your experience in life is determined by where and upon what you choose to focus your attention and energy, just as a photographer must decide on what to focus the lens and what to leave out.

Again, we are confronted with a variety of distractions these days. Going back to our smartphones, they have as many distractions as the number of apps found on them. Each one of them is vying for your attention – if you allow it. (A quick inventory of the apps you check, when you first arouse yourself from sleep, can be quite illuminating.)

If you let your attention wander all over the place, you’ll end up feeling a bit muddled and blurry, just like the picture that results from a lens that is not held still. The solution? Take charge of focusing your attention, and you will be taking charge of each situation you face.