How To Stop Time
The joy of attending and a personal challenge
Last Saturday, I took a pottery wheel throwing class. The class, a gift from my son and his wife, was something I’d never have thought of doing.
When the wheel is spinning and a lump of clay is taking shape under your hands with each revolution, there’s no option but to be in the moment. When your next move can make or break your creation, you attend to the task. As the pottery wheel revolves, time stands still. Two hours pass in a blink.
How often these days do we attend to one thing at a time?
We eat at our desks. We listen to podcasts while we’re cooking. We respond to emails during meetings. We talk on the phone while driving.
We’ve become habituated to optimise efficiency and productivity over concentration and creativity. We spread ourselves too thin so we can do more with less.
Maybe we got more done today, but are we happier for it?
The irony is that single-tasking makes us more efficient and boosts creativity. Allowing ourselves to focus means we produce better quality work faster.
What if we substituted juggling everything for the joy of attending to just one thing? What if we intentionally slowed down time by showing up more fully to do less?
One of the lessons in the Story Skills Workshop I teach encourages students to notice their lives by removing their earbuds as they move through the world.
Would you like to join me and give it a try for the next seven days? If you’re up for the challenge to single-task and be more present, please comment below, and we’ll compare notes at the end of the week.
Let’s see if we can do better together, friends.
Well, Bernadette,
Here are few tricks that help me fight "busy brain' and "monkey mind" and cruise through my day.
Do work or important tasks in separate, distinct sequences.
Immerse yourself in a necessary distraction sequence when needed, but DON'T mix the two-
that's a prescription for failure. An electrical circuit can only carry so much current.... until the breaker pops.
Stash your phone. Remember Pavlov.
Anyone who 'wears' their phone is potentially lame or at best handicapped by it.
Yes, I know, we must all be immediately connected, but at one time we never were, and everyone got in touch just fine.
Think of yourself as a sophisticated engine.
It needs to rev, it needs to idle, it needs to cruise, and, it needs to rest.
As you drive through the terrain your day, realize that you must adjust your RPMs to accommodate various conditions- hills and valleys, sharp turns, dead ends, and full stops.
Pace yourself. Change your oil. Top up the gas tank...use Premium.
Every day is an unfurling road, and distance travelled is a relative concept.
It's less about the destination and more about the journey.
With a new freelance job for the next month or so, I’m in need of single tasking practice. I’m in.