For the short-term, having the ability to stay “in it” is an actor’s lifeblood. I don’t do much theater, something I’m remedying these days, but if you can’t keep your wits about you for an entire show, all is lost. And while screen work offers the safety net of repeated takes, the concentration level can be just as intense over the course of a twelve hour day, if not more so. I recall times of having to keep myself at a low simmer for hours on set. It’s draining.

For the long-term, having the ability to focus on a career day in, day out, is the lifeblood of the business side of acting. This is perhaps even harder. With no “boss” down the hall, we are in a constant state of self-starting, and have to summon Herculean will to keep going at times.

So, how is this concentration cultivated? By concentrating. Just as you have to lift weights in order to lift heavier weights, Right Concentration is like a muscle. And how does this happen? Through the sheer force of will, or by using Right Effort, to create Right Action, Right Speech, Right Intention and Right Livelihood, while maintaining Right View and using Right Meditation.

Simple, right? Actually, it is. It’s a beautifully self-contained philosophy. I continually marvel at its elegance.

I’ve seen my concentration come and go. Last winter I was nearly rabid in getting things done. So far this spring, I’ve slowed down, and have been as likely to go for a walk as read Variety, though I can feel the blood starting to tingle again. And yes, this exercise has been enormously helpful.

Sometimes you have to go back to basics. Thankfully in this case, there is such beauty in the basics that it’s easy to come back again and again.

All joking aside, I am appalled at how short my attention span has become, and wonder if I were doing “Nicholas Nickleby” whether I would be tweeting from the wings.  Even writing these few lines, I’ve stopped to change my music, glance over at my email, and figure out how which train I need to take to get to my next appointment.  (Happily, I have a solid meditative practice and was able to “observe” my thoughts without getting to wrapped up in the them, and I did, in fact, return to the scene in time.)

In college I was capable of reading an entire book in a single sitting if it was as short as, say, “The Trial” or in two days if it was a little thicker like, say, “Moby Dick.”  I read “Martin Eden” on an overnight train from Palermo to Rome.  I used to write for hours uninterrupted and kept a journal that routinely had ten page entries, written by hand in my blessed Mead notebooks.

Those days are gone.  Today I spend my waking hours fending off feeds and posts, sifting through an avalanche of garbage in search of some relevant information, and deleting emails with the headline, “This is so funny!”  (I don’t care who you are, I’m not looking at it, so stop sending them.)

There’s a real professional consequence to this phenomenon for all us, but those who work, in part, in the memorization business are disproportionately affected.  And I’m concerned that I might reach a point where I’ll need cue cards or a live feed in my ear to get me through a performance.  We laugh now…

Information is wonderful, and technology has the potential to democratize the world, but this incessant overload is unhealthy.  And yes, I am aware of the irony of blogging about this, so insert your sardonic snicker here.  In the meantime, I’ll be trying to read more than five pages without getting bored… or following that link… or checking my google reader… or downloading that album… or all at the same time…

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.

She pressed on, pointing out that to her eyes and ears, I was already 98% the person I claimed to want to be.  What was missing, she argued, was a very small piece.  She’s mad indeed, I thought again.  Why I’m listening to her at all is a mystery…

I recently had a similar conversation, though on the other side of the ledger, as somebody made the sweeping statement that she needed a full out radical change of course in her life.  The earlier madness that came my way must have been contagious, because I reflexively thought, no, what you need to do is change yourself by about two percent.  And I went on to make the same case that was made to me some time earlier.

Yes, two percent is the magic number, I decided.  Change the self by two percent, change course by two degrees, increase your savings by two percent and watch that interest compound.  It’s the small things in life that add up.  Two percent it is.

But as I rode home on the subway today I was struck with another thought.  Scientists and eight graders are fond of pointing out that the genetic difference between man and ape is roughly in the two percent range.  If that’s the case, then this whole “change myself by two percent” is a wild over-estimation.  If two percent represents the difference between hurling feces and putting a man on the moon, then I’m thinking I need to change myself by about .00001 percent.

And I think I can manage that.

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.

Wow.

These are just a few examples.  Click for larger views.