Like Ash

With palms together,
Good Morning All,

Multi-tasking is the great illness of the contemporary world. This disease is a result of attempting to do more with less and not being aware of doing any specific thing at all. It is a prescription for automated sleepwalking.

As workplaces demand more, people rise to the task, or so they believe. They pride themselves in being able to work on several operations at once, believing this will increase productivity and bear fruit in their lives. At home we multitask and fail to be present, not enjoying, just doing more for less.

The value of multitasking is a lie just as sure as the one told by Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman.

In fact, people who multitask do not task at all. They are non sentient robots going through a set of motions and sometime they wake up to discover their lives have all but disappeared, their children are grown and their spouses have found love and comfort elsewhere. Just as Willie Loman did.

Multitasking kills awareness. It anesthetizes the present moment. We do not truly live in this world of splintered attention. We splinter with our attention and become fragments of the human beings we are capable of being.

An old Zen teaching: There is wood, there is combustion, there is ash. It is a mistake to think of these as the same thing or part of a process. Wood is not turned into ash. Wood is wood. Ash is ash. Fire is fire. When we see process, we fail to see what is there before us, just as when we balance a checkbook while washing the dishes and attending to the children fails us from each: we are doing neither of these.

Choose to do less and accomplish more. Be present in your meeting, attend to your child, wash the dish: in each case establish a full presence in the situation. If this requires you to adjust your life, then perhaps less is more again.

In the end, how do you wish to be remembered? The person who was really there or the blur that could not be still?

Be well.