Focus

I had an interesting experience with focus this morning. There are these pesky little flies that gather around in swarms this time of year down by the beach. In the past few years I have had my fair share of them in my eyes, up my nose and in my lungs. They are just plain pesky. I usually walk along the edge of the water. It seems that the flies like to hang out by the edge of the water. So, this morning, I found myself walking in and out of swarms of these little flies. Then, I had a breakthrough. When I focused on the flies then they seemed to be everywhere and that's exactly when one flew right into my eye. After that incident I decided to focus on the space between the flies or the place where the flies were NOT. Do you know what happened? Huge paths of non-fly areas opened up. In fact, it was like they weren't even there at all. I just kept taking steps in fly-free zones. When I would look back I would still see the swarms of flies right where I had walked but miraculously they had not bothered me.

Talk about a powerful demonstration on focus. I've said it before and I'll say it again - when you look for what's wrong, you will get more of what's wrong and when you look for what's right then you'll get more of what's right. It's really that plain and simple. When you think about it, there is infinitely more space between the flies than there are flies so it is obvious that if you focus on the space then it is space that you will see. We tend to get fixated on a problem and then focus on everything about it. This just brings about more of the problem. The answer is to focus on what is NOT the problem. In doing this you set your focus to look for "NOT the problem" and things will change almost immediately.