Despite
trying to get some work done, his gaze twitched nervously across the various
objects on his desk, skipping over them in quick succession, ever so
briefly touching each one with his mind in a carousel of table top distraction.
A porcelain figurine, a flashcard reader, a camera, some cables, a soft toy, a
plastic character of graphic nature, measuring tape, mug, crystal ball, gilt
frame without photo, souvenirs, speakers that look like flies eyes, some
costume jewellery. Where he would usually be compelled by the invisible hand of
his anxiety to check if anyone had posted on instagram every 10 minutes, recently
his mental escape from the computer screen was refuge in things within a metre
of him that he could reach out and touch, and which he took to moving around,
reorganising in little groups, brief collections that made sense only to the
edges of his reasoning, but which were gradually exerting greater and greater
gravitational pull on his eyes away from MS Word to his right, or left,
depending where he had placed them that afternoon. The pursuit recalled the
endless fascination of playing with building blocks as a child, their
willingness to absorb the implication of stories without anything being too
clear, but this was more calming. As he turned them over repeatedly in his mind,
the objects often merged together, sometimes one way, sometimes another,
appearing in his wandering attention when he was away from his desk, so that on
the tube, standing in the queue for the post office, waiting for the lift, he
could turn his thoughts towards these collections of things. Shapes which now
in the light of his imagination began to evolve away from their primordial
beginnings on the desk next to his computer, sometimes reaching dazzling
heights of kaleidoscopic inventiveness, always exercising his freedom of focus,
enlarging his field of awareness to include and enjoy the creativity of distraction.
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