As Cyclone Vaianu makes its way down the country, I am sitting in the eye of the storm, in the Bay of Plenty. Having been hammered by 130km easterly winds, we now await the forecasted similarly strong westerly gales.

The eye of a storm is curious place; it is calm and peaceful but full of potential as power is wielded all around it. This is a useful analogy for the inner peace that students at Ficino are invited to discover through the Pause. It is a place of refuge that can be sought at any time. There are certainly growing storm clouds internationally, which can be as frightening to consider as the ferocity of cyclonic winds. Meditation and the Pause provide a place of rest, enabling a reassessment of the world around us, and an ability to view it from a more balanced perspective.

Balance is important for our young people as they navigate the online world, and the longer this can be kept at bay, the greater the chance of young people having the capacity to discriminate for themselves. According to Louis Theroux in his recent documentary on the manosphere, children from the age of eight are being drawn into following online influencers. Furthermore, there has been a lot in the media recently about the dangers of social media addiction for young people following a landmark ruling in the United States. Big Tech has, for the first time, been found liable for ‘deliberately and knowingly designing addictive products‘. Recent experiments have been conducted in which children who innocently sign up to social media platforms are being presented, within hours or even minutes, with material they did not seek about eating disorders, sleeplessness, paranoia and other mental health issues. The ruling suggested that this material is deliberately served up by algorithms to engage the minds of young people because of its shock factor.

Attracting and retaining children’s (or anyone’s) attention is sometimes described as the attention economy. In one of our recent school assemblies, four states of attention were presented to the children: two of them useful and two unhelpful and often harmful.

The two useful states are:

Attention Open – This is when our attention is outward-looking with no particular focus, but fully present and receiving sensory impressions clearly.

Attention Focused or Centred – This is when our attention is directed to the precise point at which it needs to be, so that all the knowledge necessary for action is available and there is nothing in the way. For example, the way in which top sportspeople only see the ball when making a shot – the attention facilitates the knowledge. I recently saw a film called The Blind Sea about a blind surfer who fulfils a dream of surfing the largest waves in the world at Nazarre in Portugal. He is guided by a whistle and describes a period of time when he can’t hear anything, not the thundering of the wave breaking or the howling wind, but just the whistle; his focus is singular.

The two problematic states of attention are:

Attention Scattered – This is when we are doing mental multi-tasking and our mind is being distracted by one thing after another in quick succession with little or no control.

Attention Captured – This is what the Big Tech companies are competing for. This is when our attention is sucked in and completely absorbed, basically without our consent. Social media critics describe it as ‘stolen’ attention.

Ficino School has the motto, Rejoice in the present. The first two states of attention take place in the present moment and the latter two in the past and the future.

The rain has returned and the westerlies are howling – Rejoice in the present!