CHAPTER X
ATTENTION THE ROOT OF DISEASE OR HEALTH ATTITUDE
The Attention of Interest
Attention naturally follows interest. It can, however, be held by will to the unappealing, with the usual result of transforming it into a thing of interest.
One of the laws of the mind we have already stressed is that what we attend to largely determines what we are, or shall be. The interests which secure our consideration may be the passive result of emotional life, the things which naturally appeal, which give us sensations that the mind normally heeds; or they may be the active result of our will which has forced application upon the things which reason advised as worth acquiring.
We found that the beginning of health of mind consists in the directing of thought toward the health-bringing attitude. We have seen how quickly the normal mind can be diverted from the undesirable by a new or stronger emotional stimulus. We found that the sole appeal to attention in the baby-life is through the emotions, and that it is natural throughout life for the mind to heed and follow the interesting; which is only another way of saying that thinking follows where emotion leads, unless volition steps in to prevent. The supreme test of the will’s power is its ability to hold the train of thought in the line that reason directs, when feeling would draw it elsewhere. This ability marks the man who does big things; while the inability to ever turn attention away from the interests proposed by feeling assures weakness.
Some of the most charming people we shall ever know are those temperamental children of happiness whose interests are naturally wholesome and externalized, whose natures are spontaneous and joyous, and who live as they feel, seemingly never knowing the stress of forced concentration. With them attention follows feeling, feeling is sweet and true, and volition simply carries out what feeling dictates. And life may not be complicated.
But there is another class whose attention also follows in the ways of least resistance; and life for them is a wallowing in the morbid and unwholesome. In them feeling is perverted, they seem to see life habitually through dark glasses; they passively attend to the sad, the distressing, sometimes the gruesome and the horrible with a sort of pallid joy in their own discolored images. The first group puts joy in all they see, because they are brimming full of joy themselves. These others find only the unwholesome in life because their minds are storehouses of it. We say that each type has projected himself, that is, has thrust himself out into the external world, and is standing back, looking at his own nature and calling that the universe.
But neither of these two groups can long withstand the stress of a world they only feel and have never attempted to comprehend. The irresponsibly happy ones are too often crushed and broken when life proves to bring loss and failure and disappointment; the morbid probably will cease some day to enjoy their melancholic moods, and be unable to find their way out of them. If both had learned to control attention, they might have been saved. The happy, care-free child of the light is at desperate loss when the sun he loves is obscured, if he has not learned to look upon the far side of the clouds to find that there they glow golden with the rays temporarily shut from him. Because clouds were not interesting to him he never attended to them—and now he cannot. If the pessimistic, morbid one had looked away from the shadow to the sun it hid he, too, in the end might have seen with sane eyes and lived so wholesomely as to find all the good there was in life. Willed attention, rather than spineless feeling distractibility, might have saved him.
When thinking can be forced to follow where trained reason directs, and can be kept in that direction, the greatest problem of physical and nervous well being is solved. To the nurse there is no other principle of psychology so important. But no child ever had his attention diverted by reasoning alone. The object at which you wish him to look must be made more impelling than the one he already sees, or he must want much to please you, else he only with his eyes will follow your command while his mind returns to his real interest; and the second you cease to command that eye service, he looks back to the thing that was holding him before. The beginning of all education is in arousing a want to know; in turning desire in the direction of knowledge.
I am an undisciplined child and I want only candy for my lunch. It is not good for me. Milk is what I should have. I don’t want it. You may deprive me of the candy and force me to drink the milk, and I can do nothing but submit. But I rebel within, and I am only more convinced that I “hate” it and want candy, and that you are my natural enemy because you force the one upon me and deprive me of the other. If I were insane and so, of course, could not be reasoned with, this might be inevitable. But it would be unfortunate. In that case, if possible, do not let me see the candy; let only the food it is best for me to have be put before me, and perhaps eventually I shall come to want the more wholesome thing—for it is better than the hunger.