Day: October 21, 2019

It all starts with a list. If you’re lucky or just young you find that there is not a ton of responsibility on your plate just yet. It might be that lists are too premature at this stage. After all, how much do you really need to do? However, the unlucky are the ones who struggle. The ones who’ve been weathered by age and responsibility find that it is always a balance of trying to live a happy life and completing as many tasks as they can stand to complete while living with the reality that they (we) cannot complete all of them. Still there is respite in lists. There is this sense of control that manifests when you decide what you can and cannot accomplish; what you will and will not do each and every day. Feeling in control makes it better, if only a little.

So, it starts with a list. It is a collection of everything that needs to be done. It starts with what must be done today, but it cannot end there (if only because what must be done today never can all actually get done today). It stretches and puffs to include the larger list of responsibilities that are not daily. It is the grading and the home tasks and the papers tumbling down the pipeline. It is the job applications and the cleaning and the groceries. It is the practices and the planning. All of it matriculates on the list until it looks like Santa’s list and you feel like you must’ve been quite naughty to garner all of these responsibilities. Maybe, but that is neither here nor there. Things need to get done, and knowing what those things are is, as the Joe’s said when you were a kid, “Half the battle.”

You fight the other half with a piece of mind. You must be radiant in your daily selection. You must channel awareness of what must be done, maintained, and put aside. Perhaps the hardest part is sacrifice. It is difficult to limit your own freedom. It is difficult to say, I am not going to spend 3 hours on happiness today. Maybe just one. You know that choice impacts those around you and that makes it easier to blow off the work and decide there will come a time, when you are alone perhaps, to get it all done. Though you know that time is an illusion crafted by your mind to allow yourself to enjoy the day and the people you love.

This is why we have the list. This is why we put times on everything. We build a range and decide when things will get done and we stick to it.

Or at least we try. We fail. We try again the next day.

Can two things that seem to function in opposite directions co-exist? This is the only proper way to ask the question of how one can practice mindfulness while being an ardent multitasker. The wreckage of the last 30 years of my life suggests that the answer is a clearly defined ‘Hell no’

Let’s at first dispense with the comic ease of pointing out that I put clearly defined next to a phrase in quotes which, while it should not be used grammatically hardly ever, can be used to indicate a questionable level of clarity of the appointed word or phrase. So, yeah. I get it.

Now that the clowning is out of the way I can say this very clearly: I have failed at multi-tasking over the course of the last 30 years and I don’t feel like I can afford to try it for 30 more years and expect a modicum of success. I can be good at compartmentalization when I allow myself to be, but straight up two plus things at once is a losing strategy.

Mindfulness is important. Staying locked in on a goal or task allows you to put in maximum effort and energy and even see things in a different way than if your attention was split elsewhere. I’ve spent a great deal of my professional life with my attention split elsewhere. It is only when I’ve locked in on a single goal or task that I was able to experience success. My best writing comes when I sit at my desk (or on the floor) for a few hours dreaming around the story and the story world. I have to become immersed in order to recognize and reveal the minutiae that takes a story from meh to money.

Catchy wordplay aside, I know and have known for some time now that I am not good at multitasking. Lately I’ve been shifting back towards compartmentalizing my life. I am making an effort not to talk or think about youth sports outside of a 3 day period (it was a solid 5 when the middle school stuff was monday/wednesday). I’m rediscovering the lost switch to turn it on and off. I need that switch back, because I cannot do that and be a writer and be a teacher all at the same time. I wind up losing a chunk of the mental energy to pure confusion and as a result the rest of my life is severely impacted. It hurts relationships. it hurts my ability to parent.

Back to the drawing board then (cliche but effective). I’m writing up a schedule that allows me to be in the headspace I need to be in when I need to be there and learning how to install mental transitions that move me away from the things I ought not to be thinking about and queue them back when their time approaches.

Maybe I’ll write a book about it once I work it out.