on being selective

am i being selfish or focused?

Anna Weyant, 2021

I’m oscillating between a never-ending duality of wanting to be alone—in rich, dynamic solitude—and just wanting to have a little fun. To indulge in the desire to grasp those delicious, juicy moments that are ripe and tugging at the metaphorical branches they hang from. I guess this is just an elaborate way of saying that it’s hard to focus. It’s hard to prioritize what is a priority for you, because the world doesn’t want you to focus.

Focus is hard. This is nothing new, but I’ve noticed that the way I’ve been coming up against the resistance to focus lately is much more subtle. I used to find that the decision between focusing and not focusing was fairly obvious. There was a clear Right and Wrong answer. You could clearly see the responsible and irresponsible choices. But as you get better at “doing life”—as your social circle more closely resembles your values, as you attract opportunities that genuinely excite you, as your work increasingly aligns with your interests, it becomes harder to discern when you should tuck yourself away from the world and when you should indulge yourself in what is being offered to you in the moment. In short: as you get more selective with the elements of your life, focusing becomes harder. Because everything in front of you is uniquely aligned with you.

This reminds me of a line from Kendrick’s most recent album: They like to wonder where I’ve been / Protecting my soul in the valley of silence. He says everything I’m trying to say pretty succinctly here. As your life gets bigger and better, the need for you to protect your inner world grows proportionally. Because as your ideas manifest into reality with greater velocity, you become a stronger magnet for the people, places, and things that align with you. There is then no one but you to say: actually, I need to just hang out with myself tonight.

As you get better at curating your life, everything around you becomes more seductive. This is the shadow of taste: that what you surround yourself with is always compelling. The people are interesting. The events are exciting. The conversations are enriching. The work is enticing. The restaurants are inviting. And all of this overflowing goodness that you’ve attracted—selected!—into your life makes honouring your priorities even more challenging. As your equilibrium climbs to be in greater alignment with what you value, the line between constructive and distracting becomes more blurry. There is no clear Right or Wrong decision anymore, because everything feels Right to a varying degree.

They say that the taller you grow, the bigger your shadow gets. Meaning: as you expand, so do the aspects of yourself that you’re not fully conscious of. When your strengths and interests flourish, so do the parts of yourself that you pay less attention to, especially if you’re compromising on alone. The way this manifests for me is: I love being social. I love learning about others, cross-pollenating ideas, being open to new and exciting experiences. But I also require solitude—not only to write, but to develop and maintain the sense of clarity I need to navigate the world crisply, wasting little energy on indecision and guilt. When I am activated socially, it’s easy to let solitude slip, which is where I keep myself accountable for everything that is important to me. I’m a better person when I’m living in alignment, honouring my values. I think we all are. When we are at peace within ourselves, our capacity to pause between stimulus and response expands. We choose what feels best to us instead of what we’re afraid to miss out on. We are less judgemental, because there is less negativity stewing in our subconscious looking for a canvas to project itself onto.

I think this is one of those subtle ways that being “selfish”—which is often just a learned way of saying that you’re taking care of your own needs—is in service of others. When you feel better about how you’re living, you’re more pleasant to be around. You are more accepting, gentle, kind. You are better at allocating your energy to what feels right. You act from a place of abundance instead of scarcity, and thus you are not resentful of the people and places you give energy to because you only say yes when you genuinely want to.

When you create the space for solitude, you have time to look inwards and ask:

• how am I doing right now?

• am I happy with how I am spending my time?

• what do I need more of?

• what do I need less of?

• what am I resisting?

• what have I not taken care of?

• what is weighing on me?

• how can I resolve that?

These simple questions cover most of the bases when it comes to checking in with yourself. But sometimes we don’t even make space for these simple asks, because we are so caught up in the social gravity of where we are, in “the flow”. But if we say yes to everything without pausing to check in with ourselves, our values wither as our impulsiveness expands.

It has taken me a while to notice the importance of subtly checking in, especially in a phase of expansion, where novelty is always emerging. It can feel like you are at an all-you-can-eat-buffet full of everything you’ve ever craved. Initially, you want to take everything. But the point of a buffet isn’t gluttony, it’s optionality. And with more options, comes a greater importance for curation—for being selective. When you’re in a phase of hunting down what you like, you’re focused on the opposite of being selective: you are maximizing options, trying everything, being generative. But if you do a good job at manifesting more of what you want into your life, you quickly need to shift from generating more options to paring down your existing ones. Because solitude—the space for reflection and creation—is what keeps this continuous stream of options, opportunities and abundance flowing your way. And if you lose sight of the magnet that attracts it all (yourself!), you might end up far from the person you were before all that you were seeking became available to you in droves. You might end up someone new, someone shaped more by their environment than by themselves, attracting a new set of options no longer aligned with who you want to be. Without creating space to maintain your inner world, your external world will reconfigure it for you without permission. Or: when external time outweighs internal time, your ability to “just be” is drowned out by the constant stimulus of always being somewhere, doing something. If that ratio of external:internal time stays out of balance for long enough, it can erode what got you to the optionality-buffet in the first place.

This duality between expansion and contraction is just life, though. To open yourself up to inspiration, or to spend time alone and re-center. These decisions appear incessantly. So, I’m writing this to remind you (me) that when you are around experiences that start to feel consistently more attractive than alone time, be cognisant of how easy it is to loosen your grip on protecting your solitude—the core pillar of your well-being. No external experience, no matter how juicy and enriching, can replace it. As Charles Bukowski famously said: isolation is the gift. There is no supplement for being alone with yourself, for looking inwards in the absence of distractions and stimulation. Protecting your focus becomes even more important and difficult when what is on the horizon feels increasingly aligned. Because again: no matter how aligned the experience, it can’t replace solitude. Look at the celebrities that burned out young, that got caught up in the powerful tide of fame too early. I don’t doubt that it felt nearly impossible to say no to all that was coming their way—everything that they had dreamed of for their entire lives suddenly becoming available all at once. Practically irresistible. But in the end, the durability of the self relies on our ability to know our values and align our actions with what is important to us. No one can do this for us, and no container lets us reflect as earnestly as we can in our own company.

As wonderful as the world of the senses is, its depth pales in comparison to what we can find in our inner world if we sincerely look. But looking requires us to notice that it is there at all, to see it subtly requesting our attention, to say no to something asking us to keep our gaze outwards. The reason this gets harder as you live in greater alignment is because the more aligned you become internally, the more aligned your external world becomes. That external alignment can then distract you from continuing to cultivate internal alignment. But your external world can only reflect the parts of you that are being cultivated consciously within. And when you start to fall out of balance with yourself, it is only a matter of time until your external world reveals that internal rupture as well.

All of this to say: check in with yourself. When the world picks up (as it often does around this time of year, when it feels like everything is happening all at once), it’s easy to forget that alone time is part of an abundant, aligned life. Your external world is a lagging mirror of your internal world. And if you fall out of touch with what is going on beneath the surface, that will eventually boil over into your environment. So get ahead of it: make note of how you feel, of what is important to you, of how you’re allocating your energy. Gently nudge yourself towards what feels aligned.

It is not selfish to focus—it is an act of service, to yourself, to those around you, to the world. We are better people when we are living intentionally. Don’t assume the world will uphold your values for you. To do that, you need to make sure you’re saying yes only to what feels right. And sometimes, the only way to do this is to listen to Kendrick’s wise words: to protect your soul in the valley of silence—to simply be alone.

It’s safe to say no to the world. It’s about approaching your options from a place of trust: recognizing that as long as you stay focused, the bigger and better the buffet will become. You’re not missing out by being selective. Choosing to be alone is an inherently generative act—it’s a way of signalling to yourself that you are a priority, that your own company is enough. The more comfortable we can be being alone in a sea of optionality, the easier it becomes to focus. And that focus nurtured in solitude becomes a force multiplier on all that we do, including what we say yes to. Solitude fertilizes the soil of our inner world, where the fruits of our being grow and ripen.

---

Do you resonate with what I write about? Maybe we should work together: If you resonate with the ideas I write about and want to cultivate a life you genuinely enjoy living, where you align your actions with your values, move towards the changes you know you want to make, and consciously harvest the self-knowledge that emerges through that process, send an email to isabel@mindmine.school or DM me on Twitter to explore what working together 1-1 would look like.

---

Related pieces:

• avoidance & expression

• on slowness, taste and living well

• becoming yourself is a process of reduction

Best place to find me: Twitter—where most of the ideas I write about (and many more) are first introduced—like this essay, conceived here.

Best way to support my writing: share this piece or any other with someone (and tell them why it made you think of them!), sign up for future essays, and if you feel so inclined, comment. I do so enjoy reading your comments <3.