We have all had the experience of injuring one of our fingers – with the pain and throbbing and swelling of that finger, all the attention is drawn to it. It becomes as if we only have that one injured and painful finger. We forget that the other 9 are fine. Pain-free becomes a kind of non-existence.

Our way of responding to life can often be the same. We find ourselves caught up by our worries, our fears, the last bad thing that happened to us, that someone who slighted us, or the thing we did that we now regret. We look back on our experiences and often remember the one thing that could have been different – if only the weather had been better, then the outing would have been just perfect… we were given lot of positive feedback but only remember the one area for improvement that our boss suggested. Our ‘injured finger’ becomes all we can think about – our attention is taken hostage.

I do not mean to belittle the seriousness of our present troubled times – far from pretending everything is alright, I challenge us to look at the totality of our experiences and lives. If we can look up from our injured finger, we can start to consider how we can mobilise and strengthen the other 9. Resilience and effective response is key!

I’ve found so much to learn from this:

• it is natural and necessary to attend to our pain and injuries – how else will we protect ourselves and heal our wounds?
• It is also useful to be aware of our negativity bias – “… negativity is essentially an attention magnet”. If we wish to really be balanced and objective, then effort is required to overcome this innate inclination. More on how to do this in my next post.
• What a miss on our part to forget about the 9 healthy and pain-free fingers! What might it be like to apportion our time and attention according to reality? Giving 10% of our attention to the finger that is hurt and 90% to the ones that are not? What can or will we do with the resources and energy we have, how will we respond to our challenges and opportunities?

In the next post, I’ll share some ways of growing our ability to be more balanced and open in our attentional field. But you can start right here by recognising the glimmer of recognition in your mind and heart, noticing the feeling of possibility and opening even as you think about your 9 healthy and pain-free fingers, or caring appropriately for the injured 1.