Eric Frydenlund: Solar eclipse shows need to focus on here and now (2024)

PRAIRIE DU CHIEN — In a world filled with distractions, it’s easy to lose our focus. We concentrate on the latest sensation, rather than on what’s truly important.

I’ve been known to lose my focus while squinting at text, computer screens or road signs and trying to decipher a coherent message hidden between the fuzzy lines.

I’ve also been known to lose my focus in the middle of a brainstorm, diverting my attention from an idea to checking the Brewers’ score, which results in the loss of a good thought that I chase around my memory as if I were looking for a lost set of car keys.

Oxford Languages’ dictionary draws a distinction between visual and mental focus: 1) the state or quality of having or producing clear visual definition, 2) the center of interest or activity.

Yet in practical terms, they are thesame thing. In taekwondo, the ancient Korean martial art, focus requires a union of mind and body, whether actuated through the eyes or the brain. As an example: A master kicked an apple off the tip of a sharp sword while blindfolded, never once cutting his foot. His “secret”: He took a mental picture of the apple before the blindfold was placed over his eyes, burning the visual into his mind.

Grand Master J.B. Chung of the Madison Tae Kwon Do School taught me and other students the value of focus in the martial arts, not only to defend ourselves but also to improve our lives. We use focus to enrich our days with clarity.

We have the ability to change our focus, finding new experiences to capture our attention. We tend to focus on the mundane, whether it’s driving to work, staring at the television screen, or mowing the lawn. These experiences fly through our consciousness like traffic on the expressway at rush hour. We see them but don’t fully experience them.

Occasionally, extraordinary events force their way into our ordinary lives. On April 8, my wife and I stopped at a convenience store parking lot while traveling to witness the partial solar eclipse visible in Wisconsin. The wispy cloud cover over our location offered a semi-transparent screen on which the outline of the eclipse could be observed. The orb of the moon cut a piece out of the sun, as if it were taking a giant bite out of a Ritz cracker. A piece of the day disappeared as well, not only in the dimming of light, but in the departure of the mundane.

Our dog Gill sensed this as well. As the eclipse began, he whined in the back seat in a state of agitation, as if he could feel something was amiss. He felt this extraordinary event without ever looking up.

In her powerful essay “Total Eclipse,” Annie Dillard writes about our shifting awareness. “As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition, we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it is a transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge.”

We don’t need an eclipse to change our focus. We just need to wake up. We miss things that have always been there but that we’ve never noticed before.

A full moon rose as a curtain call for its matinee performance April 8. The milky-white sphere hung in the night sky over the Mississippi River bluffs like a beacon for lost travelers. This was a solo performance, since its costar from the eclipse was showing off on the other side of the Earth. The moon has risen 25,000 times in my lifetime, yet this one took center stage in the here and now.

We don’t live in the past or future, unless our minds take us on a diversionary tour. We live in the present. By focusing our attention in the moment, we open an unlimited expanse of experience, measured by our wakefulness rather than time.

Finding dusk in the middle of the day, discovering the new amid the old, allows us to focus on what’s important: this enormous moment in time.