Nurturing hard-earned disinterest in the superficial, abandoning our immediate needs, and finding scope in what Mary Oliver calls “eternity” takes enormous effort. We must neglect pressing needs, ignore threats, and suspend ourselves.

But the reward is glorious: time slows, and we melt into true emotional comfort and creative flow… perfection.

Even the slightest interruption feels like an attack in this wondrously creative but vulnerable state.

I first heard of this “fear of being interrupted” in Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s estimable memoir, an intimate map of the mind and soul of a lifelong reader.

I contracted a phobia for which there is no name, the fear of being interrupted. (It may also be why, as I grew up, I came to prefer reading late at night, when the intrusive world has gone to bed.) Sometimes, at the peak of intoxicating pleasures, I am visited by panic: the phone or doorbell will ring, and someone will need me or demand I do something. Of course, I needn’t answer or oblige, but that is beside the point. The spell will have broken.
From Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Ruined by Reading

I underlined these words so firmly I tore the paper. Schwartz put words to feelings and visualizations to fears that I and other writers, thinkers, and ponderers have long felt. Poets Mary Oliver and Rainer Maria Rilke. Writers Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard. And, of course, Canada’s most famous monastic, Leonard Cohen.

In “The Luckiest Man in the World,” Cohen writes:

Saturday night really is, as they say, ‘the loneliest night of the week.’ I hunker down with my radio and a few balls of twine in case I want to tie something up… Sometimes, a spider will descend on its hideous wet thread and threaten my hard-earned disinterest.
From Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing

A spider threatens our thoughts? Why are our thoughts so fragile? Because they aren’t real? Don’t memories and thoughts exist whether we access them or not?

Perhaps not. Recent neuroscience research argues that memories are not (as we imagine) file cabinets; they are formed anew once we call them up. Not only does this mean memory distorts truth, but it also means the effort to have a memory is rooted in creativity rather than rigorous thinking.

Creativity requires safe soil.   I’m a believer that certain spots, especially in nature, also require our silence. “To ‘make conversation’ is ruinous,” wrote Scottish writer Nan Shepard about her glorious Highlands. While company enhanced the experience, conversation did not: “To speak may be superfluous.” This self, the one that floats sublimely free from immediate needs… we are vulnerable, angered, even disoriented. We form hides and protective walls. And most dangerously, we fear. Schwartz continues on her interruption:

The spell will have been broken. In fact the spell has already been broken. The panic itself is the interruption. I have interrupted myself.

We interrupt ourselves, indeed. In John Steinbeck’s journals chronicling tremendous productivity, self-doubt, and achievement, the fear of interruptions, specifically people needing him, unnerves him completely:    Art is the stuff of work, not dreams. Never has this been illustrated so deeply and personally as in John Steinbeck’s (1902-1968) daily journal—he called it his work diary—kept during his tremendously productive period from June to October 1938, during which he wrote every day and eventually produced 619 handwritten pages, of his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath.  
Steinbeck empowered the journal to keep score of his productivity and discipline, and, in return, it kept him engaged and focused.  
In 1951 while writing East of Eden, his last great work, Steinbeck did something similar except instead of a diary he began each day by writing a letter to his great friend and publisher, Pascal Covici. The result was a less frenetic and less irritable author.

Irritated today. People want to see me next Monday. Can’t be. Just want to sit. Day is not propitious. […] I’ll try to go on now. Hope to lose some of the frantic quality in my mind now. It’s just like slipping behind at Stanford. Panic sets in. Can’t organize. And everybody is taking a crack at me. What time, want to use me. In aggregate it is terrible. And I don’t know where to run. Ought to go into the wild somewhere but I am needed here. Got to calm down.
From John Steinbeck’s Working Days: Journals of the Grapes of Wrath

What Steinbeck sought, French travel writer Sylvain Tesson achieved: complete solitude in the “wild” to explore his mind and being. During his self-imposed isolation in Siberia, Tesson seeks solitude, gains it, and loses it in a moment of rage.

In his diary The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin in the Middle Taiga, that moment of interruption happens when his sanctuary, a lone outcrop on the lake’s edge, becomes the place that “Russia’s nouveaux riches fawn like groupies.” Specifically, snowmobiles. Tesson is devastated, embarrassed, and angry: “What I came here to escape has descended on my island: noise, ugliness, testosterone-fueled herd behavior.”

Devastated. How resonating. Being interrupted is more than losing thoughts or to-do lists. It can feel like we lose a part of ourselves.   I want to draw the distinction between losing a part of ourselves and purposefully emptying our empirical being of the “self.” The first is a transgression against us, the second is a release, in which we are the acting force. Read more in “The Need to Empty Ourselves.” Or worse, that part is destroyed.

When I began writing, I had to explain to my husband that the slightest chirp could pull me down from my thoughts and land me hard on the ground, creatively broken. I can’t ask him for silence in our home, but I can ask him not to need me during certain times. He tries. But even now, I see him turning his head to get my attention, wanting to talk…tossing me his “busyness,” as Mary Oliver called it.

The Old Poets of China
Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, and then crept into the pale mist.
From Mary Oliver’s Why I Wake Early

It seems unreasonable, and at times it is, but this need from others will stunt many of us who long to connect with unspoken parts of ourselves rather than freely given parts of others.

We can relocate to the woods (Oliver, Dillard), the mountains (Cohen), Siberia (Tesson), but the intrusive world is beyond our control.

What we can control, however, is how we regain focus once lost. Right? That is perfectly uninterruptible.