Where focus goes, energy flows.

You can’t force focus. The tighter you grip, the quicker it slips away.

Focus is not about screwing your eyes shut and clenching your teeth until the world goes away. It’s more subtle than that. I’ve been thinking about it as holding a small bird in your hand. Too tight, and you crush it. Too loose, and it flies away. The art is in the balance.

When we talk about focus, most people imagine a battle — force against distraction, self-discipline against laziness. But real focus doesn’t live in that warlike posture. It’s less about defeating the noise and more about learning to stay with what is in front of you. You don’t need to white-knuckle your way through life. You need to practise a kind of soft precision, where attention rests steadily without collapsing.

I feel this most vividly on the trails. Running uphill is simple: dig in, drive forward, push. Downhill is where the test comes. The instinct is to brake, to tighten, to control every footfall. But that stiffness is exactly what makes you stumble. To move fast and free on the descent you have to trust your body. You release your feet, let them flow beneath you, let the ground come and go without interference. Too much control and you’re on your face. Too little and you lose your line. The balance is everything.

Focus works the same way. You can’t force it with strain, and you can’t abandon it to chaos. It’s about learning that middle space — where attention holds steady but supple, where you’re awake and present without clinging.

One simple way to train this: take an object, any object. Sit with it. Hold your attention there. A stone, a candle, a breath. When your attention drifts — and it will drift — notice. And gently bring it back. Over and over. No punishment, no judgement, just the return. This is the practice. The noticing is the work. The return is the work.

Over time, you stop seeing focus as something you summon only when needed. It becomes a way of being. You are gathered rather than scattered. You are in relationship with reality, not running from it or smothering it.

The bird in the hand. The feet on the trail. The stone in front of you. All teaching the same lesson: control is fragile, letting go completely is fragile. But the middle way — soft, steady, balanced — that is where focus lives. That is where freedom begins.