Free Just 2 Seconds by Gavin de Becker, Thomas A. Taylor, Jeff Marquart Page A

positioned on the front of the train encourages you to focus on the current, and helps you to quickly forget the past (literally, that which has passed). The mind will try to hold on to things that have already disappeared, but you can use the advancing reality to keep you in this moment, then this moment, then this moment.
    Imagine driving from New York to Los Angeles. It is nighttime. You can make a whole journey of 3000 miles able to see only in relatively small increments of the few hundred feet illuminated by your headlights. Safety requires that you focus on those few hundred feet about to be crossed, and you compartmentalize thoughts about things that are hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Through this process, you reach your destination, having been present all along the way. In protective work, focus on what you can see (what is within the range of your headlights), and not upon what you cannot see.
    Zen in the Art of Protection means taking thousands of mental snapshots every hour, and quickly discarding each one that doesn't matter, in order to make room for the next, which might matter. It's easy to slip into reevaluating a useless past perception, keeping it mindlessly in Mind, turning it over again and again. The word ruminate is often used to describe deep thinking, but the actual meaning of the word refers to the action of cows when they bring already-swallowed food back up from their stomachs into their mouths to chew on again. That's not a bad analogy for what we do with thinking sometimes, bringing ideas and concepts that have already been mostly digested back into our minds and uselessly going over them again. While in a crowd with your protectee, for example, what is really worth thinking about? Very little. What ideas are worth revisiting? Very few. Most importantly, what can help bring you to the present moment, and what can help you keep moving with time? The surprising answer is Distractions. Distractions can serve to bring you to the present moment, if you are willing, that is, to accept the gentle tug of each new perception.

Be Driven by Distractions
    Someone might say, "A loud noise distracted me," though it's more likely that the noise brought the person back from distraction, back into the present moment, back from thinking about the past or the future, back to that which is Right Here. When we get distracted from our thinking it's such an irony, since thinking itself is the most frequent and pervasive distraction from what is actually happening Now. Thinking is usually more destructive to your mission than most actual occurrences in your environment.
    Rapid movements, jumping, outreached hands, cameras flashing, hands reaching into pockets, cars pulling into traffic a block ahead, a briefcase you can't immediately match to a bystander, a person running toward you, a person moving away, a person firmly resisting your nudge, someone's eyes darting to the side, someone's eyes holding your glance too long -- all these events, even those that later turn out to be unrelated to danger, have profound value to your mission if you let them serve to bring you into the Now. Things we previously called distractions can be used to keep us aware of and perceiving events in our current environment. The protector's attention can be, in the best sense, driven by distractions.
    Being aware allows perception of events to occur, and perception brings information to you via your senses as opposed to via your memory. Because perception brings current information as opposed to dated information, it is a protector's most important resource. If the route between your senses and your muscles is congested by thinking, action is inhibited. Logic, judgment, imagination, memory, contemplation -- all these clog the path between perception and action.
    Interestingly, thoughts are not your enemy; it's thinking that gets in the way, and there's an important distinction between the two. A thought is something that arises in