Tara (by Cosmic Egg aka the cat's mother)

 Returned to Anima Mundi 25/01/21

She came. She conquered. She left [26/01/21]

  

I could not take a photograph of

the exquisite softness of your fur

and so your memory is

locked in the pores of my fingertips

 

I could not capture

your comforting animal smell

and so your scent is

sealed in the hairs of my nostrils

 

I could not record the sound of

your stealth, interrupted only by a

discreet cat-lick, and so your silence is

secured in the membranes of my ears

 

I could not forget

your beautiful trusting eyes

and so your soul is

nestled inside my heart

 

Can an image or word ever capture your sheer presence?

Trouble not the heart with this question for it knows your being

No perfect-moment capture necessary

 

The heart is the witness to your true nature

Blessed is the heart that knew you

 

How to be indistractable (by Nir Eyal)

 

Stop blaming technology – distraction starts within. Manage your inner triggers to enjoy greater focus and a fuller life

Need to know

‘Just a second. I just need to respond to this one thing,’ I said to my daughter, as I attended to my iPhone.

Only much later could I count the mistakes in that statement. No, it wouldn’t take ‘just a second’; no, I didn’t ‘need’ to respond to the email – I’m an author and researcher, and thus rarely receive messages that have a drop-everything-and-answer urgency to them. And no, it wouldn’t be ‘one thing’. My brain would be too tempted, I’d feast on it all.

After I finished, I looked up and my daughter was gone. The worst part: before I became distracted, we had been playing a lovely game, telling each other what superpower we most wished for. It could have brought us closer together, but I’d just blown the spirit and substance of it big-time.

If you’re a parent in the 21st century, I bet you’ve experienced your own version of this. But it’s not just parents, it’s all of us in our interactions with each other. Distraction has become the norm. We’re blessed with pocket-sized supercomputers that connect us to anyone and everyone, and a buffet of information. But there’s a dark side: those same gadgets distract us, often at the moments that matter most.

Of course, smartphones didn’t invent distraction – they’re just the latest culprit. Before that, we blamed television. And before that, it was the telephone, or comic books, or the radio. Go back more than 2,000 years, and Socrates was even criticising the written word, for causing ‘forgetfulness in the learners’ souls’.

Still, our present feels different, with the sources of distraction seeming greater in number and more ubiquitous. One study in 2014 showed that when two people are talking, the mere presence of a smartphone resting on a table is enough to change the character of their conversation. That’s a tame example. To see the seriousness of the problem, look at the sobering statistics on ‘distracted driving’ in the United States.

After I abandoned my daughter and our game for an utterly inconsequential email, I realised I needed to deal with my distraction problem. First, I tried a popular approach: I blamed technology and made a serious attempt at a ‘digital detox’. I bought a flip phone, subscribed to a print newspaper, and even purchased a 1990s-era word processor without an internet connection. I convinced myself that, once I banished all the technology from my life, I’d become the disciplined writer and focused father I’d always strived to be.

Talk about a rude awakening. Sitting at my ancient word processor, my eyes began to peer over to my now-tantalising bookshelf. ‘Hmmm,’ I said to myself, ‘I really should take a glance at this book’. I’d justify the distraction as necessary for ‘research’. And if it wasn’t reading, then I’d find something else – the laundry that needed to be folded right now, my desk that needed to be tidied-up this minute. The technology wasn’t distracting me. I was distracting me.

That’s when I started a five-year journey to understand distraction, its causes and its cures. I discovered a great deal that I found surprising and counterintuitive, and I developed methods to deal with my distraction that actually worked – and didn’t involve me trying to turn back time and operate a flip phone. I realised that distraction often begins from within, not without, and found that the fix came from identifying and managing the psychological discomfort that leads us off track.

As often as not, distraction is your brain ducking challenging feelings such as boredom, loneliness, insecurity, fatigue and uncertainty. These are the internal triggers – the root causes – that prompt you to find the comfort of distraction and open a browser tab, Twitter or email, instead of focusing on the matter at hand. Once you identify these internal triggers, you can decide to respond in a more advantageous manner. You won’t always be able to control how you feel – but you can learn to control how you react to the way you feel. A trigger that once sent you to Twitter can perhaps lead instead to 10 deep breaths.

Distraction, in other words, is a symptom of a problem – not the problem itself. Those deeper and systemic reasons – such as an inability to cope with fear, anxiety or stress – deserve our concern, because it’s only when we start to address them that we can make real progress. When we begin to understand what we’re trying to avoid by clicking over to Twitter or checking the news for the 10th time today, we can begin to address the issue itself, and not medicate it through more distraction. We also begin to appreciate how habitual the act of avoiding discomfort via distraction can be, and how much it’s become a part of how we work and live.

The good news is that there’s something paradoxical about discomfort: it’s actually the best tool we have for evolving and developing as a species. Feeling bad isn’t actually bad; it’s what helped us survive. Writing in 2001, the American psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues observed: ‘If satisfaction and pleasure were permanent, there might be little incentive to continue seeking further benefits or advances.’ If we didn’t feel bad, in other words, we’d never achieve good.

Once you understand the depth of distraction, you can start to manage it and improve. After years of experiments, I found myself less distracted – a quality that improved nearly every aspect of my life. It turns out that being able to focus on the subjects and people in my life who matter improved everything from my health to my happiness to my productivity. That can seem obvious, but I couldn’t have fully appreciated the joys of living an indistractable life if I hadn’t gotten there on my own after a five-year journey. Being indistractable can lead you to not just change your life for the better, but also experience life fully.

 

What to do

 Self-explore

Identifying the triggers that made you feel bad in the first place requires self-exploration. When you notice yourself feeling distracted, pause and ask yourself what you’re feeling. Are you worried? Are you afraid? Then go one step deeper. What caused the sensation? How does it feel in your body?

In exploring my own internal triggers, I began to appreciate that my anxiety about a project, which might lead me to find a tempting Wikipedia rabbit hole, was actually adaptive: the fact that I was anxious was good because it meant I was trying to become better. It was sometimes even as easy as saying to myself: ‘You’re getting distracted right now because you’re worried this won’t be up to snuff. That’s okay. It means you’re trying to do your best work, and that’s something to feel good about.’ It seems like a simple mental trick, but even that thought can have a profound influence in keeping you on track.

There’s an interesting paradox about internal triggers: they can be big, imposing, powerful issues, and yet the fixes can sometimes be easy and quick. Here’s an example: let’s say that an internal trigger when you’re about to get started on a looming project is boredom. You just can’t bring yourself to get excited about doing your taxes. And because you get bored, you get distracted. But if you know you’re going to get bored, you can find ways to avoid the distraction that will soothe the boredom. For instance, if you set a time limit to work on the otherwise mind-numbing task that is so short, you won’t have a chance to get bored. Anyone can work on their taxes for just 10 minutes. This is called the 10-minute rule, and it’s an effective way to avoid distractions of all sorts. The point is to anticipate the internal trigger and then intercept it with a new routine rather than allowing yourself to slink away into doing something you didn’t intend to do.

In the case of my interaction with my daughter, the internal trigger might have been anxiety about work or fear of missing out (on an email). But I can address both of those proactively, so that they don’t interfere with precious daddy-daughter time. In the case of my work anxiety, I could make sure that someone on my team is monitoring incoming messages. I could put up an ‘out of office’ email that encourages people to call me if there’s really an emergency. Or in reality, I could get comfortable with the discomfort that I might indeed be missing out on something, but that’s all right too. Any one of those is a better and more constructive response to the internal trigger than being distracted.

Whatever approach you take to address your inner triggers, it’s encouraging to note that merely recognising uncomfortable feelings and identifying them could be beneficial. For instance, in a smoking-cessation study, researchers found that participants who learned to acknowledge and explore their cravings managed to quit smoking at double the rates of those in the American Lung Association’s best-performing cessation programme. Just identifying and investigating a craving had a tremendous impact.

Reframe

Once you’ve identified the triggers, you can reframe the task at hand. Sure, you might be ‘forced to do your taxes’. But another way of thinking about that is that you ‘get to review last year’s business successes’. It sounds laughable, but it works. When I hit rough patches mid-book writing, I would say: ‘I get to share this with my audience,’ as opposed to: ‘I really have to work on the book today.’

Here’s one strategy: I found the fun in whatever I was doing. Yes, I know, this is where you roll your eyes, but hear me out. I learned to stay focused on the tedious work of writing books by looking for and finding the mystery embedded in my work. I wasn’t ‘writing’, I was ‘exploring’. I wasn’t Ernest Hemingway; I was Scooby-Doo. Research indicates that even the simple act of thinking of something that you don’t enjoy as fun can have a powerful and real effect on your brain’s interpretation of it. ‘Fun,’ writes the game designer Ian Bogost in his book Play Anything (2016), ‘turns out to be fun even if it doesn’t involve much (or any) enjoyment.’

To take a different example – let’s say you want to exercise consistently, but dislike lifting weights or jogging. Again, you could find ways to view the whole experience as a positive one. Envision every drop of sweat as a sign that your body is getting stronger. Learn to see the burn as tiny muscle fibres getting better at doing their job. Perceived difficulty is often a matter of perspective, and you can choose to re-imagine almost any discomfort as a blessing.

The benefits of reframing also extend to how you think about your own tendencies. Before I focused on distraction, I used to chastise myself for being a ‘distracted person’. ‘Stop getting distracted Nir!’ my brain would shout … at itself. A dive into the research showed that this was making my problem worse, not better. Instead, I began to do what the contemporary wellbeing literature recommends: I showed compassion to myself and my struggles. I began to speak to myself the way I might to a friend: ‘Nir, you’re distracted right now, and that’s OK. What’s causing it? Let’s figure it out.’ These simple thoughts helped me reframe my temperament, which is a critical step in addressing distraction.

Identify your priorities

Self-exploration and reframing are all in the head. You also need to attack the substance of your work life, noticing not just where your mind goes, but where your time goes as well. It will help you stay focused if you make sufficient time for ‘traction’ – the actions that draw you toward what you want in life. That can involve leaving time for relationships, fun or diversions too – but, crucially, it all has to keep a place on your calendar.

Here’s one method: turn your values into time. Do you want to make your family a priority? Figure out how much time you actually want to spend with them and reserve that time on your schedule. Want to focus on your health? Again, decide how many hours you want to devote, and block off specific chunks of time in your schedule. In translating your values into time, you take something fuzzy and undefined (eg, ‘health’) and turn it into something definite and countable (ie, ‘hours’).

When I did this, it gave me room to give in to things that I enjoyed, without letting them become distractions from what most mattered. So if I wanted, for example, to scroll social media, I would give myself an hour on my calendar to do it. It meant that I could browse Twitter or Facebook guilt-free – as opposed to using those things as a way of avoiding other work.

‘Hack back’ against external triggers

You’ll notice, I didn’t lead with this. The preliminary work of figuring out the internal triggers and turning your values into time is what allows you to then figure out what to do about those pesky notifications; to create environments that are conducive to focus and that help you defeat distraction. That means getting a handle on your email, and replying only during set times. It means using real-time communications channels such as Slack deliberately and sparingly. And it means giving your smartphone a spring clean, removing apps that no longer serve you, and disabling notifications you don’t need. This process also involves culling your media diet and deciding which feeds you want to ignore and avoid altogether. In sum, it means regaining a measure of control over your work environment and your information inputs – giving yourself the maximum time and room for focused work.

Plan ahead

Forethought is the antidote to impulsivity: you can use a ‘precommitment’ to a particular course of action to exert a powerful influence on your future behaviour. If you precommit, you make a choice in advance, and pledge to stick to it – and then you don’t need to depend so much on the whims of self-control or willpower in the moment. Consider a simple example: once you buy a plane ticket for a friend’s wedding, it’s rare that you back out. Another example: once you put money away in a retirement account that has a penalty for early withdrawal, you’re less likely to take money out. Research in health psychology has similarly shown the benefits of these kinds of pacts – such as committing to visit the gym with a friend or ordering groceries in advance to reduce in-the-moment temptation. Crucially, precommitment devices can also help you defeat distraction. I used a precommitment device to finish my book. It took the form of a price pact: I told a friend of mine I’d give him $10,000 if I didn’t meet my deadline. I kept my money and finished my book. You can use pacts with yourself strategically, creating barriers that allow you to overcome your bad habits and bring out your best work. However, remember to use precommitments only as the last step. Before you do, be sure to master your internal triggers, make time for traction, and hack back external triggers, then use precommitments as the final firewall between you and distraction.

 

Key points

• Master your internal triggers. A lot of writing about distraction focuses on the surface issues: how to turn off notifications on your phone, how to reduce the apps you use. That is all well and good, but the process of becoming indistractable runs much deeper. I discovered that if I started with the tactics – such as eliminating technology – then I’d just find other ways to distract myself. So I focused on what I call ‘mastering internal triggers’ – what discomfort was I avoiding by turning to social media or my phone? Then I was able to work on those distractions and build my work habits around them.
• Make time for traction. You have to make a schedule that’s not driven by ticking off your daily to-do list, but instead helps you achieve the things you value most. That could be spending time with family, friends, work, hobbies – anything. But the point is to organise your time around these domains – specifically, around the things you say you want to focus on. I’ve found it helpful to be explicit about those values, and then to turn those values into a time.
• Hack back external triggers. Ironically, it’s in our work environments that we’re often the most distracted from doing our work. This is doubly true today, with more of us working at home where we’re mixing the personal with the professional. Take a good look at the notifications that you have activated, both on your phone and on your computer. Think about how many different interruptions you have during the day. Are all of these necessary? I highly doubt it, and I know from my experience that reducing the notifications is a small step that can have a big effect and often takes just a few minutes. You won’t miss these external triggers, and the paradox of eliminating a phone screen update when you get a new Tweet or turning off news alerts is that, in most cases, you won’t notice what you’re missing. Your brain, however, will thank you for giving it one less distraction from whatever you’re focused on.
• Prevent distractions with pacts. Make an agreement with yourself or others about how you plan to spend your time. This is a useful strategy for getting over that final hurdle, and it often involves accountability to systems outside of yourself. Make a bet with a friend to spend your time the way you say you will. Use third-party apps to block websites that you know pull you away. In the same way that making automatic contributions to your retirement accounts sets you up for success, you can tackle behaviour change by using pacts to take momentary willpower out of the equation.

Learn more

 As someone who writes about distraction, time management and focus, I’m used to hearing the claim that social media is ruining people’s minds. Critics argue that these digital platforms are capturing our attention, wrecking our relationships and hijacking our brains. However, there’s little scientific proof that social media ‘permanently reduces attention span’ – that claim and many of the other wilder accusations about social media are founded on little more than opinion. One of the most interesting contributions related to this topic that I read this past year was from the British psychologist Amy Orben, who took a deep look at the other studies published on the links between social media use, digital technology and wellbeing. To my surprise, and to the surprise of many others, she found unreliable research methods, exaggerated claims and bad data throughout this research field.

That doesn’t mean the opposite is true, of course: absence of evidence, as they say, is not evidence of absence. There’s no question that overuse of tech can have negative consequences. My own view is that technology is not inherently good or bad. It has to do with how much tech you use, who is using it, what they are doing, and what they would be doing instead of using it.

I admit that puts me in a different camp than many of my peers who write and research in this space, because I am still a fan of technology even as I write about its hazards. My book Indistractable (2019) doesn’t recommend that people move to a cabin in the woods, quit social media, or block the internet entirely from their lives. I found that such advice, while well-meaning, didn’t fit with the reality of how most of us live today.

The issue, as I’ve pointed out before, isn’t principally the technology itself or social media. It’s getting to the root causes of what leads us to be distracted in the first place. When I worked on the research for Indistractable, I discovered that I was just as susceptible to being distracted by a news report or a dirty closet as I was by a glowing screen. Does that mean I cut out the news, or let my closets go? No. It meant having to figure out what I was avoiding (writing) and why I was avoiding it (all the writerly anxieties) and then dealing with those. It also meant building systems to manage my time, attention and internet use.

Thankfully, technology companies are waking up to the need for a more balanced relationship with the devices and services they’ve created. It’s why you’re seeing features such as ‘Screen Time’ as defaults in Apple products; it’s also why you’re seeing stronger and more highly tailored parental controls. The big tech companies are responding to the market’s growing need for sensible technology, and it’s a promising start. We need to encourage them to keep going – if they get rewarded for trying to restrain and build controls, then they will keep doing it.

Finally, and most importantly, we have to remember that it’s up to us, not them. We have the strategies and tools to deal with distraction now, and we don’t have to wait for Apple to release a software update or for Google to change how its browser is built. We can take control of our attention now, and we can remove and better manage the things that compete for that attention.

 

Links & books

 One of the reasons I wanted to investigate distraction is because I thought there ought to be better approaches to the subject than ‘just meditate’ or ‘move to Walden Pond’. My family and my friends live in a technologically enhanced world, and I don’t think that’s inconsistent with also being able to focus for long periods of time on substantive work. That line of thinking led me to explore digital resources that help us defeat distraction; here are a few that I have found most valuable:

My book Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (2019) provides research-backed techniques to overcome distraction. There are more than 30 pages of citations from academic journals and dozens of practical techniques, as well as a section on raising indistractable kids and building an indistractable workplace.

SelfControl: I use this app and recommend it to everyone: it helps you block websites that distract you.

Surfing the urge (MP3): an audio-based exercise from the University of Washington that helps an individual develop the practice of dealing with cravings or urges to behave in a certain way.

Mixmax: among other things, this app allows you to delay email delivery – which can help you control your inbox.

SaneBox: this software analyses your email habits to determine future email importance and auto-filter/organise those emails so that the most important get the attention that they deserve. It also comes with the SaneBlackHole feature that ensures you never see emails from a particular address ever again.

News Feed Eradicator for Facebook: a personal favourite, and it does what it says it will do – makes your News Feed disappear, so you can use the best of Facebook without getting pulled into the vortex.

Distraction Free for YouTube: similar to the News Feed Eradicator – this scrubs ads and recommended videos, so you watch what you came to watch on YouTube.

If you’re anything like me, you want to know the hard thinking and science behind some of the techniques I’ve outlined above. And you’re in luck: the past decade has seen an explosion in research on this issue, which I would argue is a direct response to all of us becoming more distracted, or at least feeling that way. Here are some of the journal papers, books and blog posts that helped me understand the psychology of distraction:

There’s a difference between a break and a distraction: in their book The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World (2016), Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist, and Larry Rosen, a psychologist, explain that good breaks can reduce mental fatigue, boost brain function, and keep us on-task for longer periods. They helped me understand the distinction between a ‘break’ and a ‘distraction’ – one that allowed me to give my brain a pause without sending it down a rabbit hole I didn’t intend to go down.

The rewards of reward-based programmes: pacts and incentive programmes were one of the most effective interventions for my issue with distraction, and again, the research bears this out. In their 2015 study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania explored incentive programmes for smoking cessation, and found that those that gave people financial rewards for quitting smoking led to higher rates of sustained abstinence from smoking. It led me to think about how I could reward myself for remaining indistractable, and how I could create pacts that led to the behaviours I wanted.

Your smartphone isn’t the enemy: I think it’s important to be honest about issues such as ‘technology addiction’ and distraction. In many cases, what you’ll read in the media are sensationalised accounts designed to make you think that your smartphone is the root of all evil in the world – particularly as it applies to raising children. I would encourage people interested in these subjects to take a deep look at the research; what you’ll find is surprising – technology isn’t rotting people’s brains indiscriminately, as the psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh explains in her blog post in 2017.

 

2 SEPTEMBER 2020

How to be indistractable | Psyche Guides

Winter's Watch (an Aeon video)

 

The profound solitude of a winter spent alone on an island caring for an empty hotel

‘It’s the great waiting of winter … hulking there and biding its time until life comes back.’

A meditation on the appeals and challenges of solitude, Winter’s Watch accompanies Alexandra de Steiguer who for 19 winters has been the ‘caretaker’ of the Oceanic Hotel on Star Island in New Hampshire while it is closed during New England’s coldest months. Tasked with tending to the island’s 43 acres by herself, de Steiguer finds peace and meaning in being alone with her thoughts, and creative inspiration for her photography, though at times her mind has turned to ghosts and intruders. With breathtaking cinematography from the US filmmaker Brian Bolster, Winter’s Watch was a film festival favourite in 2017, appearing at AFI Docs, Camden International Film Festival, DOC NYC and Palm Springs International ShortFest, among many others.

Director: Brian Bolster

Executive Producer: Thomas Harrington

4 January 2018

The profound solitude of a winter spent alone on an island caring for an empty hotel | Aeon Videos

Eva Cassidy | San Francisco Bay Blues | Simply-Eva.com

Eva Cassidy - Blues Alley concert (12 live performances)

Wonderful! Have been looking for this for close to two decades 😍

Eva Cassidy - One Night That Changed Everything (documentary) #livestream

A beautiful tribute to the star of Eva Cassidy (by her band members) 👏👏👏

A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH (by Maya Angelou)

 

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

 A Brave and Startling Truth: Maya Angelou’s Stunning Humanist Poem That Flew to Space, Inspired by Carl Sagan and Read by Astrophysicist Janna Levin – Brain Pickings

 

In Blackwater Woods (by Mary Oliver)

 

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Poetry Chaikhana | Sacred Poetry from Around the World (poetry-chaikhana.com)

 

Lunch (or: spontaneous meditation on a lettuce head) [13/01/21]

 

Preparing a lettuce head today I was

Stopped in my tracks

 

My hands unfurling the leaves no longer

Following my command: hurry up, I’m hungry! but

 

Understanding the moment as an offering, a timeless moment

Of awe at nature’s humble beauty

 

My fingers in service, gently prising apart layers of green garment;

Leaves, huddling like a bunch of rugby players, releasing their grip