VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 9, SECTION 1
Time, Energy, Attention
Here we are, and the great line of torment, eight chapters of it, is done. It began with a line off the internet, and it has taken up what torment is, how it happens, its root in the heart, its forms in the hands, its two directions, the pen that sees it, how it gets handed down, and where it runs up against the boundary of the institution. This last chapter does one thing. It gathers those eight chapters into a single word. Live. A body of understanding, however clear, that cannot be lived into every day and every second, is still a dead thing on the page. This chapter goes one by one through what a person who has seen torment clearly can actually hold onto, in his own life. Today, the first, and the most solid three. Time, energy, and attention.
First, why this chapter starts from holding on. The eight chapters before it were mostly about seeing clearly, seeing what torment is and where it comes from. But seeing clearly is for the sake of what? Not so you can get in a few more curses. Not so you can stand on a height and point at other people. Seeing clearly is, in the end, so that across your one life you can truly hold onto a few things. Hold onto what? Onto the things that, the moment you are tormented, get drained away for nothing. The worst of torment is not that it stops you getting one errand done. The worst of torment is that it is a bottomless pit, drawing off, a little at a time, a few of the most precious things in your life, while you go on not even noticing. This chapter brings those drained-off things back, one by one, and teaches you to hold them. And this is the ruler of the fifth chapter, turned inward. You have seen how others torment you, and so, before anything, you should hold onto yourself, and not let that torment hollow you out for nothing.
The first thing is time. What torment draws off most directly is your time. An errand that one trip would finish, the runaround turns into five. Those extra four trips, what are they? They are four stretches of time cut, by main force, out of your one life. Those four stretches could have gone to the people at home, to the thing you truly want to do, to a decent night's sleep. And now they are all spent on four wasted trips. And time is the one thing in the world that, once spent, can never be earned back. Money gone can be made again. Time, those half-days and days burned on the wasted trips, is gone for good. Seeing that, how does a person who has seen torment clearly hold onto his time? He runs the numbers. For this thing, is it worth outlasting the one behind the window? Some things must be done, and then you accept it, and those trips are a price that has to be paid. But some things, once you see plainly that the other is just using your time to feed his own sense of position, you find another way, another time, another person, or you simply weigh whether the thing is really so necessary after all. Holding onto your time begins here. Do not pour your precious time, without limit, into a game that was set up for the one purpose of draining you.
The second thing runs deeper than time. It is energy. What torment burns is not only the time of those few trips, it is the churning of energy behind them. The most exhausting part of being tormented is often not making the trips. It is the turning-over in your heart between the trips. On the way home, the more you think the angrier you get. Lying in bed, you toss and turn, and the anger has not gone down. The next morning, before you have even left the house, the thought of facing that cold face again drains the strength out of you. That churning burns ten times what the trips themselves cost. And energy, like time, is a finite thing. Spend a whole day's worth of it being angry over one torment, and the things that truly matter, your work, your reading, the people you love, have no energy left to go to them. Here is the most insidious thing about torment. It takes up a very small matter of yours, and yet the energy it draws off can wreck a whole day, even several. Seeing that, how do you hold onto your energy? The key is one line, from the second chapter. It is not the person who is bad, it is the position doing the work. You lie awake burning because, in your heart, you have taken the thing as that person deliberately setting himself against me. But the moment you truly see that it is only that position, those four gears turning, a person poor in position confirming himself, half the anger drains right out. He was not blocking you. He blocks everyone who passes his window. You do not have to carry home, and carry to bed, a thing a position turns out on its own, and feed it with your own energy. Seeing clearly is the best stop-loss there is.
The third thing is the scarcest thing of this age. Attention. Beyond time and energy, torment steals something deeper still, your attention, the place where your mind comes to rest. A torment is like a thorn, stuck in your heart. For days afterward, you may find yourself going back to it, not on purpose. It comes up while you eat, while you walk, while you are talking to someone, halfway through a sentence it comes up again. Your attention gets hooked, over and over, by that one thorn. Your body is here, but your heart drifts back, again and again, to that window. Think how much of a waste that is. Your precious attention, which could have gone to a smile on your child's face, to a tune you love, to some interesting thought, you have fed, all of it, to a person and a matter you do not even like and that are not worth it. You have let the one who tormented you not only take your few trips, but move into your head, and take up, rent free, the best plot of ground you have. Seeing that, how do you hold onto your attention? A person who has seen torment clearly practices one skill. Once a thing is past, let it be past. He tells himself, that thing is over, that person is no longer in front of me, so why would I let him go on living rent free in my head and collecting my rent? He pulls his attention off that thorn and sets it back on the present, on the people and the things right in front of him that are truly worth his heart. This is not pretending nothing happened. It is that, having seen clearly, he is no longer willing to pay out his best attention on a thing that is not worth it.
Put the three together and run the numbers, and you see what a losing deal torment is. One torment that looks very small, one extra trip. On the face of it, it costs you two hours. But the real bill is not just those two hours. It also had you angry for three days, and that is energy. It had you, across those three days, preoccupied as you ate and as you walked, and that is attention. Add it all up, and a two-hour torment cuts, in truth, three days out of your life. This is the bill of torment that no one talks about. It is priced at two hours, and it collects three days. And the only reason it can collect those extra three days is that you yourself keep feeding it, on and on, your time, your energy, your attention. You feed it, and it collects. You see clearly, and stop feeding it, and it can collect nothing. So holding onto these three comes down to one thing. Cut the tube that runs from you and feeds torment its blood. The errand, you still go and do. But the tube in your heart, you cut, so that a two-hour thing does not draw off three days of your life for nothing. That is the first real thing a person who has seen torment clearly can do for himself.
So here is where this section leaves us. It has held onto the first three, the most solid. Time, which once spent cannot be earned back, so do not pour it without limit into a game set up to drain you. Energy, where the churning burns ten times the trips, and seeing that it is the position doing it is the best stop-loss. Attention, the scarcest thing of this age, so do not let someone not worth it live rent free in your head and collect your rent. That is the first stretch of the ninth stake this chapter drives. Seeing torment clearly is, in the end, for holding onto the most precious things in your own life, starting from time, energy, and attention. Having held these three visible ones, there are three deeper and more important things also under torment's drain, and those are relationships, and trust, and health. The next section keeps holding. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.