Crackin' Nuts, Part II

The joys and perils of hyperfocus

Ahhh, so nice. Perfect. A little to the left. A little harder. There it is! Yes!

A perfect black walnut half popped out of its labyrinthine shell. (Not what you expected? Get your mind out of the gutter. Or not.)

I spent a great many hours armed with a Grandpa’s Goody Getter nut cracker and its accompanying pair of nut snips (yes, I am sniggering like Beavis and Butthead, too) to plow through I-don’t-know-how-many pounds of black walnuts this month.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about how these walnuts helped me break the spell of procrastination. Now that I’ve gotten through them all, plus a couple pounds of pecans, I am left with an odd awareness of a quirk in my personality: hyperfocus.

Nearly every day, if I had a little gap in my work schedule, I’d sit at my dining room table and crack nuts. It’s always a zen-like task, but I soon found myself eagerly learning the ins and outs of a nut’s geography, which can be complicated. Many folds and layers, a few key gaps and then the glorious nut within.

Nut after nut, attempt after attempt, I improved. You need to just crack the nut, not pulverize it with too much force. Read the shell, and apply only as much force as needed, then back off. Another controlled move, just a little more compression, and you’ll open her up nicely!

Then you use those snips to carefully free the nut from the shell. You need to know exactly where to apply pressure so the shell falls away freely. Nuts in general and black walnuts in particular are soft and yielding, so if you try to force things, they’ll break and you’ll be sad.

Over time, I got so good at this that I’d get four pretty lobes and the “horseshoe” piece in the center out of almost every walnut, and sometimes I’d achieve Perfect Half Status. When I moved on to the easier-to-shell pecans, Perfect Half Status became the standard goal, with the Immaculate Whole being my stretch goal.

Lobe after lobe, my container began to fill with nutmeats. Until finally I found myself with a shade more than two pounds of walnuts, plus a half pound of pecans. Admiring my work, I nibbled a nut and thought about all this.

I fall into this same state when I am cracking crabs and lobsters, making filled pasta like tortellini or malloreddus, winnowing debris from foraged berries, as well as a few other things.

I love that I have this in me. I can lose my sense of time and my surroundings — only the task in front of my face matters. My whole being funnels into that task and I feel a clarity and pleasure I rarely feel elsewhere.

Everything narrows and speeds up. Connections become clearer: Oh, put your snips there and you get a satisfying result. Don’t stop doing that then. Patterns reveal themselves. My mind stills.

Hyperfocus isn’t a superpower, however. After every session of nut cracking, I often needed to rest on the couch or take a walk or work out. The aftermath often leaves me drained and fuzzy.

I happen to be skilled at choosing where to allow my hyperfocus to, well, focus, but many I know aren’t. I know some people who all too often zero in on minor tasks at the expense of the more significant tasks they face. In these cases, their hyperfocus becomes a servant of their tendency to procrastinate — they find themselves snapping out of a two-hour session researching historical efforts to breed a faster-maturing strain of hopniss when they really ought to be finishing that manuscript.

There’s nothing inherently noble about hyperfocus. It doesn’t care what it’s aimed at. Give it walnuts and you get perfect halves. Give it the wrong thing and you can lose an afternoon, a day, a week, chasing something that doesn’t matter.

But aim well and it becomes something else entirely.

Because what hyperfocus really is, at its core, is attention. Undivided, deliberate attention. The kind that notices small shifts, that learns the contours of a thing, that understands when to press and when to ease off. The kind that improves with every repetition.

And that sort of attention is rare.

Most of us live scattered lives, pulled in a dozen directions at once. We half-listen, half-work, half-notice. We skim the surface of things and call it good.

Hyperfocus is the opposite of that. It asks you to be fully there. To pay attention long enough to get it right. You can’t employ it on everything or you’ll burn out. Save it for the things that matter.

A pile of black walnuts? Maybe. Definitely with a piece of writing, or a skill you’re trying to learn. Or anything else that benefits from knowing exactly where to apply pressure, and when to let things open on their own.