When you concentrate you also ignore stuff.
(we all concentrate, for work, play, reading, studying, school … we practice it in school … people who are good at it are “good workers”…)
But you call it CONCENTRATION instead of IGNORING because the stuff you concentrate on gets easy-to-see but the stuff you ignore sorta fades away (and then you stop thinking about it, and then it disappears).
The stuff you concentrate on is relatively small. A book. An idea. A game. An attractive girl’s butt. A plan for the future. A tv show.
And that stuff getting ignored is relatively HUGE. Like a whole invisible universe there.
It’s spooky when you think of it. Like a little bit of DIY brain surgery that everybody does but nobody talks about. Like we’re all a bunch of Harry Potters casting obliviate upon ourselves.
And then we forgot that we cast it, because it’s obliviate.
So tell me what you think.
I often remind my significant other to participate in mindfulness exercises along side me to take a moment to look at “the bigger picture” what that is for her or for you is in my mind personal. For me I like to just observe everything in my environment, I try not to focus in on any particular feeling or sight or thought etc. One practice that has helped with this immensely has been Chinese Gong Fu Tea. Every weekend my partner and I take about 2 hours to sit and have tea and be observant of our lives and worlds in a way that doesn’t focus on any one particular thing. It’s almost like meditation, which is something Buddhist monks practice for decades and sometimes never achieve their enlightenment. For you your enlightenment might be achieving that defocused state and becoming more present with what’s around you.