One Thing at a Time
I love multitasking. Many women shine at it, and I’m no exception. A typical household scene in any Jewish home might include Mommy cooking dinner, while feeding the baby, helping another child or two with their homework and carrying on a conversation on the phone. And that’s just for starters!
Where is this love of doing several things at once born?
It doesn’t begin childhood, that’s for sure. Have you ever watched the earnest concentration on the face of a child at play? The rest of the world recedes into nothingness as he manipulates blocks, connects Lego pieces, or concocts elaborate imaginary wars. There’s no multi-tasking in the nursery.
That comes later. Once we’ve mastered certain skills, we start relegating those activities to the background while adding other activities to the mix. For instance, when reading becomes less of a chore and more of a pleasure, we may combine it with the added pleasure of having a snack along with a favorite book. Having mastered the art of baking or cooking, we relieve some of the tedium by turning on music or a shiur to listen to while working in the kitchen. A stroll through the park or an exercise walk is no longer just that; it’s become a matter of socializing with a walking partner or plugging oneself into some device. Thus multitasking is born.
I remember many a night at my desk as a teenager, doing my homework while listening to music blasting in the background, talking on the phone and munching on a snack. The more things I could juggle at the same time, the happier I was. Life felt more interesting that way.
All grown up, the trend continued. In my mother’s home, cooking was just that: cooking. As a young married woman in my own kitchen, I soon discovered the joy of listening to a selection of much-loved music while chopping and mixing and sauteing. After the passing of my dear father, z”l, as I faced a whole year when music would be out of bounds, I turned in desperation to Torah shiurim—and never looked back. How many thousands of meals have I put together while happily listening to stimulating ideas on the parsha or an upcoming yom tov? Too many to count.
Whether or not I remembered all those ideas afterward is a different story. It’s hard to hold onto even the most simulating words if half your mind is on something else. Which brings me to my next point. Is multitasking a good thing or a bad thing?
The answer, as so often happens, is that it depends.
Imagine this scenario. You’re in the abovementioned hectic kitchen at the pre-dinner hour, involved in food prep, kid supervision and many other things at the same time. Now, suppose there’s a knock on the door. When you open it, you find your best friend (or your sister, co-worker, or even a neighbor you’re not especially close with) on the doorstep, in tears. What’s your reaction?
Obviously, everything else would grind to a halt as you listen to her story and tend to her lacerated heart. How callous it would be to keep on chopping onions while someone’s pouring a tale of woe into your ears! How utterly heartless to consult your cookbook or even check your daughter’s math homework while someone is crying on your shoulder. That much goes without saying.
What may be less obvious is that we should probably do the same thing when a youngster comes crying to us with his problems. From the high peak of adulthood, we may view childish troubles as trivial and transitory, but the child’s pain in the moment is real. Listening to him, sympathizing with him and showing him that’s he’s loved, are not just items on our endless to-do list. They are, or should be, far more important than that. They should take priority.
In other words, however sorely we may be tempted, people and their feelings are not candidates for multitasking.
In a similar vein, no young man poring over his Gemara has ever been encouraged to do anything else at the same time. What he’s doing is too important, too mind-engaging, to spiritually significant, to be allotted anything but his full attention. The same applies to doing mitzvos, especially those that require kavonah such as davening or making brachos. Dividing the pie of our attention may be ideal in the kitchen or in our work cubicle on a slow day. The same is far from true when we’re busy connecting to Eternity.
All of which means that, while technical activities may be lumped together to our heart’s content, matters relating to the spirit shouldn’t be. Not if we want to take them seriously.
Taking this one step further, could it be that there are other things in life that we could be taking more seriously, too? Seriously enough to take them one at a time instead of all jumbled up together?
Startling thought indeed…
Deconstructing
There’s a trend in the culinary world called “deconstructing.” A “deconstructed” apple pie, for example, would consist of some crust, some filling, and some topping, all arranged artistically on the plate in anything but the tradition pie format. By the same token, a deconstructed salad is presented as a tidy arrangement of individual ingredients rather than having them all tossed together in classical salad style.
Much as I adore doing many things at once, I wonder if it wouldn’t be interesting to see how it feels to deconstruct the bundled experiences instead. Of course, there’s always the fear of boredom, or of wasting precious time. Yet, the rewards of doing one thing at a time may be surprisingly great.
On a recent evening, as yom tov was drawing to an end, I sat on the back deck with my sister-in-law, enjoying the gentle breeze, a pretty sunset, the sleepy twittering of unseen birds and then the first stars peeping out of the soft darkness. We didn’t talk much as we soaked it all in. We weren’t eating or chatting or even thinking much. A peaceful and deeply contented few moments.
Later, as we prepared to go inside for Havdolah, one of us remarked how seldom we do things like that: just sitting and doing nothing except being in the moment. It was a novel experience. And it makes me wonder if I should pursue more such experiences in the future.
I wonder what it would be like to have a snack without my nose buried in a book… to take a walk without thinking about my latest fictional plot… to talk on the phone without engaging in a mindless chore or word game at the same time. Putting aside the time factor (and we’re all eager to save a minute where we can), I’d be curious to see if doing things one at a time makes a difference to the quality of the experience.
Being an impatient sort of person, I knew it won’t be easy. But would it be worth it?
What do you think?
