Reflections 8th February

What we choose to see together.

Serial moral failure stupefies. What would once have been scandal becomes Tuesday, as we grow accustomed not through approval but through exhaustion, the normalisation that occurs when outrage itself becomes too costly to maintain. In politics, business, and in other institutions we once imagined were built on something more durable than expedience, we watch the boundaries shift and wonder when we stopped being surprised.

It is easy to feel weary, bewildered and helpless in the face of this constant stream and forget that what overwhelms us is partly a matter of perspective. Henry David Thoreau reminds us it is not what we look at that matters, but what we see.

And what we see is a discipline. Disciplines are choices we make.

This matters more than it might appear; our attention has become commodity, and there is more profit to be had in threat than reward, and more engagement in division than resolution. We are around twice as sensitive to the possibility of threat as to potential gain, and our mass and social media is owned and directed by a small minority who understand this perfectly. They profit from keeping us in a state of reactive vigilance, where everything feels urgent and nothing feels possible, other than with their help.

“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.”

Salman Rushdie wrote that, and it points to something we might otherwise miss. The question is not whether the stories being told about our world are accurate or inaccurate, fair or unfair, it is whether we have any capacity to tell different stories, and to direct our own attention towards what we might actually shift.

Stephen Covey wrote of circles of Concern, Influence, and Control, a framework so widely cited it risks becoming wallpaper. Which is a shame, because what sits beneath it is more interesting than the productivity shorthand suggests. When we dwell in the Circle of Concern, ruminating on things we cannot shift, the political weather, market tremors, the inscrutable moods of those above us, we are essentially handing over the keys to our amygdala. The alarm sounds, cortisol floods the system, and we enter that familiar state of reactive vigilance where thought narrows to threat assessment and possibility disappears from view.

Julian Rotter identified this territory back in 1954 with his work on locus of control. Believe that outside forces determine your fate, and a sense of helplessness follows. Not as philosophical position but as physiological reality. Neuroscience confirms what Rotter intuited: chronic residence in concern-space does not just feel dispiriting, it actively impairs memory, weakens immunity, and narrows the cognitive bandwidth available for anything resembling creative response. We become less capable, not through lack of effort but through where we direct our effort.

Moving attention from concern to influence is not attitudinal adjustment, it is architectural reconstruction. It engages the prefrontal cortex, the seat of executive function, allowing top-down regulation to dampen the emotional noise. More compellingly still, each small action taken within our sphere of agency triggers a dopamine response that reinforces the behaviour, gradually building neural pathways towards greater self-efficacy. The circle of influence expands as we attend to it. What Covey described, whether he knew it or not, was the brain literally building infrastructure for agency.

This is not ‘positive thinking’. It is the deliberate cultivation of cognitive architecture that makes us more available to opportunity, more capable of sustained attention, and considerably harder to render helpless. People who seem lucky are often simply those whose nervous systems have settled into what polyvagal theory calls the ventral vagal state: socially engaged, calm, and open. Not because they were born that way, but because they have spent enough time acting within their influence to convince their own biology that the world is navigable, and that have genuine agency, not ‘authority’ from a job title.

We will not find equanimity looking for order in our circle of concern. Uncertainty is a market, and there is more profit in selling the need for order than in providing it. The Serenity Prayer has a point when it asks us for the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference. The more we pay attention to what we cannot change, the less time we spend changing what we can.

Changing what we can works like compound interest. What we read, who we listen to, the work we do, the things we take satisfaction in, appreciating what we have rather than cataloguing what we lack. Small choices, repeated, that gradually shift the ground beneath us.

Our concerns about what we cannot change are what take us hostage. Paying attention to those around us, helping them do the small things that move them forward, is what frees us. Not because it solves the larger problems, but because it rebuilds the architecture of agency that makes us capable of addressing anything at all.

Right now, whilst we track the movements of those whose decisions we cannot influence, other choices are being made around us where we might actually have a say. Decisions that affect those close to us, in things that matter: in education, in healthcare, in local democracy, in the small institutions that shape daily life. Not grand gestures but incremental shifts, the unglamorous work of showing up and paying attention to what is actually within reach.

The discipline of seeing is the discipline of choosing where to look. And where we look determines not just what we see, but what becomes possible.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​