Monotropism and Meditation

A woman and a girl sit on a bench in the sun. The woman, a Buddhist monk, is eating an apple. First she eats the flesh, then she eats the core, pips and all. She eats the stalk.

I never met that monk. I read this story soon after she died. It was posted by the girl, now grown, as part of an online thread, a kind of memorial. The monk probably never thought that moment would be remembered, all those years later. Remembered, and formed into a story, and told.

Monotropism is commonly defined as a tendency to focus attention on one, or a few, passionate and often lifelong interests – fields of study, classes of objects, activities – a tendency to go deep rather than wide. Seen by many researchers and writers within the neurodivergent community as a central principle of autism, it is explained, in part, by the idea that neurodivergent people have what is often called an ‘interest-based nervous system’: that is, our lives are organised around our interests rather than around social relationships and hierarchies. (This does not mean, by the way, that autistic people don’t care about their friends, though it might mean that many of their friendships are based on their interests.) Somewhat similarly, ADHDers often experience intense but shorter lived periods of hyper-focus. For those of us who identify as AuDHDers (that is, we identify both as autistic and as having ADHD) our lives are often structured around a mix of deep, lifelong passions and shorter periods of intense hyper-focus. However the cookie crumbles, when we bring the entire weight of ourselves behind a thing we’re often able to achieve a lot.

The opposite is also true. As a full time carer, parent to a child who can’t go to school just now, I find there are a lot of demands on my time. Much of my day is spent on things that seem insignificant in themselves: booking a swimming class, buying socks to replace ones that have become too small, delivering snacks. Then there’s the worry, the constant attempt at balance. Is my child learning enough? Is he moving his body enough and eating the right foods? Does he get enough social contact to meet his needs? Feeling responsibe for a life that is not, ultimately, mine to control while also dealing with an endless to do list often leads to a feeling of overwhelm. All these tiny decisions, none of them important in themselves, add up to a life.

If monotropic focus feels like coming home for us, it makes sense that trying to keep on top of lots of small tasks is overwhelming for neurodivergent body-minds. While we can do many things that appear hard, sometimes it is the ‘easy’ things that floor us. I have always done well in formal education and have collected several degrees over the years. However, I still struggle to dress myself appropriately for the weather; I have to check and re-check appointments to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything; I find it almost impossible to be on time. While we might develop strategies that make these struggles almost invisible from outside, we are constantly living against our natures, living in a survival state, our nervous systems on high alert. This can be exhausting.

On a recent podcast, I heard GP Rangan Chatterjee interview journalist Oliver Burkeman. Burkeman has just written a book called Four Thousand Weeks, so named because this is around the length of an average life span. Its basic premise is that, while our time is finite, potential things we might care about and want to ‘spend’ our time on are infinite. We need to get better at saying no, Burkeman argues, not only to the things we don’t care about, but also to a lot of things we do.

It would be easy, at this point, to rhapsodise about the life of a monk, or a hermit, or a sadhu, to imagine that these people are able to remove extraneous distractions and live a simple life, focused (monotropically) on important truths. Except the monks I know are very busy people. Not only are they running a monastery between them, but they also have to do many of the same things we all have to do. They have ageing parents, hard decisions to make, mouths to feed. They have to clean their clothes. And the dishes. Sweep up all the never ending dust. Even a sadhu living in a cave must sometimes need to wash his lunghi.

What comes back to me now is a young man I met when I was travelling in India, several decades ago. Bearded and dressed in loose cotton clothes, he carried mala beads with him everywhere he went, incessantly running them through his fingers. He told me he was learning to meditate all the time. I barely knew what meditation was at that point and there was something performative about the beads. And the beard. And the clothes. Still, there was something about his single-mindedness that spoke to me. I’ve never forgotten him.

Thinking about him now, I realise something. Perhaps there’s another way of looking at all the task-switching I find so maddening. If our neurodivergent brains become anxious at the transition points between tasks, if those frequent transitions sometimes leave us feeling as if we are skating across the surface of our own lives – and if as carers, as workers, as people living in this world, we face many such seeming transitions every day – then what if there was a way to see those tasks, and the transitions between them, differently?

Perhaps task-switching isn’t really task switching at all. Looked at through the eyes of meditation, there is a way in which everything is really part of the same ‘task’. Here life isn’t a series of discrete moments we can tick off a list. Meditation is an activity which doesn’t split important from unimportant, doesn’t split my goals from yours. It means running the beads of our lives through our fingers, not only for the half hour on the mat each morning but throughout our days, until what we see and feel is flow.

At the same time, there are these individual beads. There is a way of being, right now, that is complete in itself. Each unimportant task has deep significance. This is true not only in formal meditation but also when we stand up and go about our lives. It’s true even when we mess it all up, when we say the wrong things, when we feel as if we fail.

Time isn’t what we think it is. We can’t put anything behind us. We can’t move on. And we don’t need to. We don’t need to try harder. Or do better. Everything we need is here right now. It has to be. If I really knew this, knew it in my bones, perhaps I’d stop rushing through my daily tasks, as if the point was to get to the end.

This was meant to be the part of the series where I write about the strengths that we, as neurodivergent people, bring to meditation. But this essay has ended up exploring something else: the strength meditation brings to us perhaps. Reading back I see I have said nothing about what meditation is, have provided no helpful strategies, no method. But meditation isn’t method, technique, protocol. It isn’t a way of doing life better. It is life itself. Life with the skin on. Pips and all.