The Centre Is Where Your Attention Was

Where is the centre? The habitual answer — in the middle. Wrong. A centre is always defined relative to known objects, and it is under no obligation to sit in the middle — it can be anywhere. More precisely: the centre is wherever the focus of your attention was a second ago. When focus scatters, the centre from which events take shape is lost. This is not an abstraction; it is the mechanics of why some intentions come true and others dissolve.

Take a living example. You want to fly off on holiday — but for that you need to earn. It seems that «I want to rest» and «I want to earn for the rest» are the same thing. They are not: whichever you want more will set the accent, and the accent will shape what actually happens — the flight, or the earning. Now add a second thought — building a house, which also needs money. The money earned «for the holiday» goes into the house, and attention slides automatically off the goals and onto the means of getting them: you focus on money alone. And then the money may arrive in the wrong quantity — because there is no understanding of what exactly it is for, or how much is needed. You lost the centre — and events arranged themselves around whatever happened to be standing in it.

The centre is wherever the focus of your attention was a second ago.

Everything is a centre

Everything has a centre. A table in a restaurant has a centre; the table stands in a restaurant, which has a centre of its own — and these are two different centres, with different potentials and different surroundings. Such centres exist relative to any other centre, at any point. It follows that everything is a centre. The task is not to find the «real» one but to learn to centre yourself: to understand which centre you are applying your attention to, to step into it mentally, and to direct yourself there. Then all the centres arranged around your desire begin to line up into a logical interconnection. The world is not chaotic — it simply builds itself around the point you hold.

Think rightly — with your goal standing in the centre of your attention.

Goals as magnets

Now, about several goals at once. Picture all your goals as magnets of differing pull, and yourself as the object drawn between them. However many goals you arrange around yourself, your position in space is set by how you shift your own potential relative to those magnets. Stand there without a centre of your own, and you are dragged along the resultant of other forces: a little towards money, a little towards the house, a little towards rest — and nowhere in earnest.

There is also an elegant hint about where to build from. The ideal centre relative to all your goals and achievements can be traced with the spiral of the golden ratio — if you take its origin from the point of your own presence. Note: not from the goals. From yourself. The spiral unwinds from the one who holds it — just as the construction of every painting of mine begins from a single point, out of which all the circles and axes grow.

So when you feel that life has «lost focus» and events have stopped coming together — do not add effort. Ask yourself: what was standing in the centre of my attention this last second? The answer is usually uncomfortably honest. Put your goal there — and let the centres around it line up afresh.

Everything is a centre. The only question is what stands in yours.

The work on the cover — «The Centre» →

— Evgeny Fleysher