He says control your attention, I say unhook your buttons

David Brooks wrote this earlier in the week in The New York Times:

"Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains. Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them."

He was not writing about Christmas, but he may as well have been. Christmas is the ultimate stimuli crucible and thus the ultimate power battlefield, in a peace-on-earth kind of way. Actually, it's always about peace. People are born with a war room in their brains where "keeping the peace" is the only mission. I don't know about you, but I knew where the war room was, and what the mission was, by the time I was four years old.

During the year, the time spent on keeping the peace is inversely proportional to the distance between you and anyone who likes to push your buttons. At Christmas time, when the universal wish is peace on earth, the war room is humming 24/7 with plans and strategies to keep the peace. I love the "peace on earth" Christmas cards. How are we going to have peace on earth when we can't keep the peace at the dinner table?

Actually, peace at the dinner table is very doable, as long as you settle for peace inside your own head. I don't know exactly what David Brooks meant by "successful people," and I couldn't say how you judge or measure your own success, but I say without hesitation that there is no success quite like getting up from the Christmas dinner table with a mind as peaceful as when you sat down, when everyone else is bleeding from bullets fired by moms and dads and sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles who have been thinking for months of ways to control your attention. They only have to hit one button. And they know where the button is.

But what if you have disconnected the button? When someone tries to push it, it no longer works. You will still hear what was said, but it doesn't hit you. It passes through as if you were invisible. The effect on you is astonishing. It is not only a feeling of freedom, it IS freedom, and power. One way to say it is, "Control of attention is the ultimate personal power." Another way to say it is, "Pushing my buttons doesn't work any more, Mother." Getting up from the table with a mind as peaceful as when you sat down is so powerful that you want to go outside and fly. It is a feeling of liberation that most people only realize in their dreams. A popular term for it is "taking back power." I call it flying sideways.