The temperature finally dropped this week.

After three weeks of working almost continuously towards a deadline, I hadn’t realised how narrow my world had become until it started expanding again.

When I’m deep into a project, my field of vision gets progressively smaller. Eventually there is very little outside the thing in front of me. A measurement. A material. A decision. Sometimes a fraction of a millimetre.

I like going there, although I’m not sure like is quite the right word.

It’s painful.

The deeper I go, the more I notice. And the more I notice, the harder it becomes to let things go. Differences that would have seemed irrelevant a few weeks earlier become impossible to ignore.

But there are nuances you only encounter at that depth.

Then the work finishes and I surface.

This time, at almost exactly the same moment, the heat broke in London. The air changed and I could feel my attention expanding with it.

Things started coming back into view. Music. Conversations. Objects. Other people’s work.

I like this state too.

And I’ve realised that what doesn’t work for me is everything in between.

Medium attention.

Being slightly focused and slightly distracted. Never going deeply enough to encounter the nuances, but never coming far enough out to really see what is around me either.

I seem to need the movement between the two.

Narrow. Go deep. Surface. Expand.

There is precision in one and perspective in the other.

Perhaps that’s why surfacing feels so good. After spending weeks seeing almost nothing except what is wrong, I suddenly start seeing everything else again.

And eventually, somewhere in that wider field of vision, something catches my attention.

The aperture begins to narrow.

And I go in again.