The Isolator

I was chatting with a friend the other day when I suddenly realized I’d missed a good chunk of the conversation. My brain jumped off the focus train without my being aware of it and went on its own little excursion. I didn’t do it on purpose. I never do, but I confess. I’m sometimes guilty of being distracted.

Distractions are a natural part of life, and people have dealt with them forever. Laments at being distracted date back at least to medieval times when medieval monks who, despite their lifelong commitment to concentration, admitted having a terrible time concentrating. They complained of information overload, forgetfulness, lack of focus, and overstimulation. Their jumpy brains, fundamentally no different from those we use to navigate our smartphones, were the culprit. Like us, the monks found other sources to blame sometimes accusing demons of making their minds wander. Who knew?

The proposed solutions to this long-standing ‘distraction’ problem changed with the times. Take, for instance, Hugo Gernsback’s ‘Isolator,’ a formidable-looking wearable machine that debuted on the cover of July 1925’s Science and Invention magazine. The large helmet was covered in black felt, lined with cork to silence outside noises and conversations, and had a baffle for breathing and narrow glass eyeholes to see through. “The eyeholes,” according to Gernsback, “make it impossible to see anything except a sheet of paper in front of the wearer.” There’s no optical or audio distraction—the perfect device for anyone easily distracted, especially us writers.

As pulp-fictional as the ‘Isolator’ looked in 1925 (as indeed it looks now), it represents a genuine effort to use old-fashioned ingenuity as well as technology to alleviate a bothersome aspect of the human condition, thereby setting a precedent for the new-and-improved isolation helmets engineered for the even more distracting world in which we live a century later.

Today we have the ingenious ‘Ostrich Pillow’ and noise-cancelling earbuds as well as the increasingly popular Internet blocker, an application allowing one to manage how much time is spent on the omnipresent, distracting Internet. Then there’s the AlphaSmarts, an old school word processor that removes the Internet temptation altogether.

For me, however, the people in my home are a bigger writing distraction than the Internet. Although they respect and support my writing time, they’re always around and pretty loud making solitude and tranquility hard to come by. Then there’s my physical surroundings—the laundry, the dishes, the lawn, the messy desk, grocery shopping, and the unpaid bills. And—oh, there’s the dog! These distractions, I conclude, will always be around. Yes, it would be great to get everything taken care of before writing but that would mean losing track of time and never writing.

So, what’s the solution? Buying the ‘Isolator’ on eBay? Ordering the ‘Ostrich Pillow’ at Amazon? Exorcising the demons that make my mind wander? Probably not. The most tenable solution I’ve found is pretty simple and straightforward: Feed my focus and starve my distractions by exercising good old-fashioned self-control and concentration.

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