This Week’s Bit of String: A stand-up concert
On Thursday, we ventured to Bristol for a concert. Out on a schoolnight! Our future daughter-in-law recommended Leith Ross, a Canadian alternative, folk-tinged singer to me and I’d enjoyed her latest album, I Can See the Future.
My husband and I were older than most of the crowd. The enthusiastic audience of two or three hundred were mainly dressed in a fusion of Bohemian and grunge, probably in their early twenties. Unlike them, we weren’t used to gigs where you gather together standing on the floor. We’ve only attended concerts and shows in theatres before.
The format presented a little challenge for rather little me. I’m only 5’2. It kept me busy though, shifting so I could see. I do a lot of walking, and my job often has me running around, but standing is different. My feet felt lumpy after a while, as if I couldn’t press them flat to the earth, as if the bones had been scrambled into the wrong places.
Luckily, the great music distracted me, and the vibes in Trinity church were excellent. I kept observing my fellow music fans lit by the stage’s residual glow. All these young people stood watching, listening, reflecting, maybe holding a loved one or swaying, rarely looking at their phones.
Impressive, really. I’m not brilliant at stopping to absorb. My mind races with to-do lists, and in fact I did some mental planning for this post.
Curiosity Vs. Distraction
The concert fell on World Book Day. At school, registration groups decorated doors like book covers in spectacular displays. For the first few minutes of each lesson, teachers were supposed to read out a section of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” building to its shocking finish during the last lesson.
A good idea, but it seemed students in my lessons, even in top sets, weren’t paying attention. Hardly any discussion sprang up. The lack of curiosity and engagement astounded me.
Apparently, though, the most negative feedback the Literacy Coordinator received over the short story was from a teacher who said: “The students had a lot of questions after. It would be better if the literacy task didn’t require follow-up.”
Really? For just one day of the year, couldn’t we dispense with rote, frantic study for exams and engage in some curiosity?
Some see inquisitiveness as a deficit in attention; a propensity for distraction. But it’s actually a sign of engagement. It just might be an engagement which doesn’t fully align with others’ plans.
Anyway, after my worries about our students apathy to books and stories, I felt reassured to see the young people at the concert engaging and responding.
Limits and Deficits
There’s probably more I could learn from them. This last month, in addition to writing in my novel, editing the last one, and critiquing other writers’ work, I’ve been crafting a gothic short story for a competition. It’s been particularly challenging to coalesce my ideas with enough suspense in less than 1000 words. I rewrote it three times before even finishing a single draft.
Nothing wrong with starting over and trying new perspectives. I’d get excited about each new idea—and then the effort of concocting just the first couple of paragraphs all over again would have me swooning into the arms of the Internet and whatever recent doom was within scrolling view.
I may need to build my stamina for both standing, and creating. I’m so used to a faster pace, squeezing my writing into little bits and bobs of time, I hardly know what to do when a more extended period is available.
Just as Leith Ross’s music made standing well worth while, music can help me focus when I’m writing as well. Leith Ross particularly sings, in a poetic, evocative way, about overcoming grief for the past in order to live in the present. Her love songs celebrate moments magnified by who we spend them with, and she often ponders the essence of home.
Her song “Grieving” has helped me through the past six months or so. I highly recommend a listen.
“But grief is love run backwards, so we love them better then,
And we love them with forgiveness, all because we know the end.
So I never will stop grieving everything that’s yet to die;
I think I’ll love after I’m dead, and I’ll grieve while I’m alive.”
Surely that’s one of the best reasons to linger in the present. What do you do to stretch your attention span and keep focused?