Today during tai chi, my laptop pinged, and I finished eight pieces of silk and sat down and checked out what was going on. Facebook post. So I went over to facebook and started futzing around…
WHAT AM I DOING??
I got up, and did the form.
The issue of distractibility is a key one in our culture. Multi-tasking doesn’t work. It’s better to stick with one task and finish it, than it is to try to do several things at once. Yet our culture tells us — constantly, really — that we should do many things at once, that it’s our nature to do many things at once. Sadly, this is wrong. We’re not designed to multi-task. It’s part of the reason why astronauts spend years preparing to go to space to do one or two small tasks — they had to treat flying the spacecraft as one whole action, not a series of discrete steps. All those discrete steps had to be ingrained in their memory and in their minds and muscles, so that it could happen seamlessly.
I’m the same way. I tend to treat the three forms I do as individual pieces, with breaks between being common. I should work on creating flow between them, though, so that I think of them as one action, and Facebook and other websites do not hold out any sort of joy at interruption.
School starts today for me. There’s a new student picnic, and I’m doing some games with a group of kids this morning during the picnic. First student contact of the year. Can hardly wait.
