Focus

I am tormented by a lack of focus.  Or perhaps a lack of grounding is a better way of putting it.  No matter what I start doing, I am incapable of keeping my attention on it.  Reading, browsing the internet, watching a show, cleaning, it doesn't matter how interesting or engaging the activity, I cannot focus and stay with it for the duration.

Even now, as I'm writing this, it's a constant struggle to keep my thoughts on the piece.  My eyes are wandering off the screen to the people around me, to the muted TV screen on the wall, to the bleak landscape I can glimpse through the half-shaded windows.  My ears are picking up the whispers of sounds that are filtering through the music in the headphones and my nose is distracted by the lunchtime smells of the cafe.  You might think that I'd have an easier time focusing at home where the distractions would be less pervasive, but it's no better at home with the laundry basket and crumbs on the kitchen floor offering a different form of escape.  There is Netflix and two warring cats, bent on gouging each other's eyes out in a quest for territorial dominance.  And let's not forget the bed and the allure of a mid-day nap.  At home the options for diffusion of focus are even more numerous than in a noisy cafe.

It's not entirely unusual for me to be pulled in many directions, but it's rarely this severe and downright disabling.  I know what I should be doing, what I need to focus on but for the life of me, I cannot force my attention to stay on task for longer than ten seconds at a time and even that seems like a stretch at the moment.

I can blame it on poor sleep or my complete lack of willpower or my horrendously sedentary lifestyle or the depressingly long winter, but the truth is it doesn't really matter what the cause is, I need to get through it and I have no idea how to do it.  Usually I'm able to compel myself to do what I know needs to be done, but the usual tricks aren't working or maybe I'm just not trying hard enough.

This entire post is only a few paragraphs long and it's already taken me almost an hour to write...  I can't even stay with this long enough to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.  Maybe there isn't one.