Petdad

Clearly distracted as of late, I find myself also distracted on why I am distracted. I hope I can just blame it on the latest Full Moon cycle which peaked a couple days ago.

Distraction isn’t good for anyone. It’s not efficient or effective. It diverts us from process or goals and thus is just a plain nuisance.

So I did some etymology research on the word to try and figure out origin of the word and it’s logical meaning when broken down. The prefix ‘dis’ I knew to be something negative of sorts. Sure enough, the dictionary defines dis as ‘expressing negation’, and ‘denoting reversal or absence of an action or state’.

Traction, on the other hand is defined as ‘the action of drawing or pulling something over a surface’, and ‘motive power provided by movement’.

Distraction is defined as ‘a thing that prevents someone from giving full attention to something else’ and ‘diversion’ and ‘extreme agitation of the mind or emotions’. Its origin is late Middle English, from Latin distractio.

It’s fascinating to me how the prefix dis, and the root word traction, are used together to form the marriage of meaning as it is used in our language today. Distraction is something with potential to cause counter productivity. Distracted is when we allow the ‘distraction’ to pull us away from process.