Everyone's got it—or so they claim. That ability to stand in a crowded stadium and watch the game while taking selfies and searching for your fleeting moment of fame on the big screen. The ability to jog on that treadmill and check your child's homework and determine next summer's perfect getaway even as you set the incline up a couple of degrees.Get it done. Move on to the next thing. Rush. Rush. Rush. Multi-tasking is a requirement of the world we live in and yet—I submit—it is a myth that anyone does it well.
It is a troubling aspect of my own life. I'm sitting at the piano. In my hands is a beautiful adagio, but what I'm really consumed with is that magazine publisher who held onto a manuscript for 7 months and just announced it has stopped publication. I'm cooking dinner and I get an idea for a chapter book and run upstairs to GOOGLE a thing or two and then run back down to the take the burning pot off the stove.
I rush from thing to thing. I'm a human "doing", not a human "being". Never living in the moment. Instead planning the future, mulling over the past.
How I admire those with well-trained minds. Concentration that wins chess tournaments, or churns out 1500 words in a sitting, or memorizes hundreds (even thousands) of pages of music.
How do they do it?
Mindfulness.
Try this. Clear you mind and think of one thing and only one thing. How long can you last? Five seconds, maybe fifteen?
And that, my friends, is why I am still working on manuscripts started 7 years go, on Mozart Sonata's begun 11 years back and on cross-stitch projects almost as old as my youngest son (actually, the stitching is still in a closet somewhere).
So here's to 2016:
To the attempt to live in the moment
To be present
To be mindful
To mono-tasking,
And to the end of the myth of multi-anything.
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