Rat-tracted

For the last 10 days, I was ‘Rat–tracted’—completely distracted by a rat in the kitchen. I tried everything to catch, kill, or chase it out! Nothing worked. Finally, thinking it had left, I sealed all the potential entry points, only to find it was still there, destroying exhaust fans and gnawing through every plastic utensil.

 

I lost money dealing with it, lost sleep over it, and even lost my inner peace. I started waking up in the middle of the night, hearing imagined rat-running noises! Like any good Christian, I began praying about it since nothing else had worked. Then, one morning, my better half suggested, "Just calm down, keep the doors open, and see if it goes out." To my surprise, it worked! I should have listened and done that earlier. 

 

But this rat distraction taught me some valuable lessons about distractions in life. For those of us who generally have our lives under control, peace-draining distractions aren’t usually major issues—they’re small things, like rats or similar trivial problems. Yet, I lose sleep over these small things, allowing them to derail my life.

 

Two weeks before this, we were travelling to the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa), listening to stories from doctors and health workers working in some of the most challenging parts of the world. Even though those conversations were recent, the depth of their struggles and pain already seemed distant to me. A week after that, I was in North Bihar, listening to the stories of friends and their challenges.

 

Yet now, the rat felt more urgent and troubling than the life-altering stories I had just heard! I wonder, what is it in us (in me) that makes the small "rats" in our lives seem more urgent and important than the pain and struggles of our brothers and sisters?

 

Is it just the tyranny of the urgent masking the truly important? Perhaps this is what we’ve been conditioned to do. When a child cries in pain, we hand them a mobile device to pacify them—shifting their attention from deeper pain to a small distraction so they forget the cries of their heart. Could this ongoing habit of diverting attention have created a pattern in me? The visible and urgent "rats" in my life divert my attention away from the real pain others are enduring.

 

Tim Challis writes in his book – Do More Better - “To be productive, you need a system. You need to build, use, perfect, and rely on it. Your system needs to gain your confidence so that you can trust it to remember what needs to be remembered, to alert you to what is urgent, to direct you to what is important, and to divert you away from what is distracting.”

Maybe I need a system of letting out the rats as they come in! And I should follow Daniel Goldman’s advice: “Starve your distractions, feed your focus.”  Literally, starve my rats and feed what is important!