oh this is hard

Multitasking

I used to so frequently parallel process and multitask that I actually didn’t know how to sit still or to do just one thing at a time.  I played Tetris during conference calls, needlepointed while watching a movie on demand, tapped out work emails while at the park with my children.  It wasn’t a deliberate behavior as much as it was my instinct.  I think I just kept moving, all the time, because that’s all I had ever done.  I was always in a rush to get to the next stop on the map.  Until I vaulted over the edge of that map, and realized I needed to start navigating by the stars.

That’s approximately when I started slowing down.

I’m sure it’s not coincidence that I now find many kinds of multitasking unbearably difficult.  This is most of all true when people talk to me while I’m engaged in something else, whether that is writing, reading, or listening to someone else.  It literally frays me to have my attention split like that.  I truly cannot stand it, and my poor children, who are frequently on the receiving end of a finger held up to say just one minute, can attest to this.

I sometimes feel like one of those many-armed Indian goddesses, and I need to sit down, take a breath, and remind myself: first things first.  One thing at a time.  Certainly part of this is a conscious effort I started making several years ago to be here now.  After all, my real life has already begun and I do not want to miss a moment of it.

But this feels like more than just my deliberate effort to be conscious of my experience.  When I’m interrupted when trying to write something, or when I try to do too many things at once, I sometimes feel like I’m going to leap out of my skin.  I feel a surge of sudden, overwhelming discomfort that verges on pain.  If I’m driving and don’t know where I’m going, for example, God help the person who turns on the radio: I will yelp and demand that you turn it off.  I need quiet to do a lot of things these days: not just navigate but read, write, think.

I still check my phone more than I should.  And I still sometimes play some quiet Tetris while listening to a call.  But on the whole my distracted, two-things-a-time behavior has gone way down.  And my irritation at being interrupted when I’m engaged in something has gone way up.  When I actually think about it, the change in how I inhabit the world is seismic.

Is this a symptom of old age and diminishing mental powers?  Or is it my slow turning towards genuine engagement in my own experience?  I can’t tell if it’s ironic or absolutely logical that this decreasing ability to parallel process coincides with my being busier than I have ever been.  It’s inconvenient timing, for sure, but perhaps it makes total sense.  I don’t know that there’s insight in the recognition that multi-tasking takes away from our ability to focus, but I do know that my own life, my own mind and heart, are giving me very real messages that I must more often do just one thing at a time.  I’ve tasted what life is like when I’m paying attention, and I am no longer willing to live any other way.

Tales of Quirk and Wonder

Lisa Ahn’s blog, Tales of Quirk and Wonder, is one of my favorite corners of the internet.  Since late last summer, Lisa has been running a fascinating series about inspiration.  I was both startled and hugely honored when she asked me to contribute to her series. I’m so often not inspired, is the thing.  And part of why I love Lisa’s series is that it always triggers a cascade of thoughts, ideas, and reflections in me.

I decided to look for inspiration where I always do.  I went outside, tipped my head up, and gazed.  And then, after a walk, I sat down at my desk.  The muse doesn’t find me unless I sit at my computer, after all.

I believe we are all full of stories.

I believe we are all looking for the way home. To whatever our essential, fundamental home is, where we are truly ourselves, where we are seen and recognized and known and witnessed as such.

I believe that telling our stories – to others, maybe, but most of all to ourselves – is the only way to find our way home….

I’m delighted to be guest posting at Tales of Quirk and Wonder today, writing about what inspires me.  Please click through to read the rest of my piece.

 

Discomfort

Last week I had an email exchange with my friend Jessica about the five years I spent living in London (ages 12 to 17).  It was a rich, irreplaceable interval of time, full of the number 9 bus and Fruit Pastilles and Doc Marten boots and weekends riding in the Cotswolds and signing our names on the Berlin Wall.  I still have dear friends from those years.

But there’s no question that the five years that I lived in London, the fifth of which I spent at boarding school in New Hampshire, were bracketed by deep discomfort.  I can close my eyes and stand in the doorway of my Upper Fourth classroom on a cold January day, when my future friend Stephanie threw open the doors and announced, “this is the new girl” before disappearing into the mass of foreign girls speaking in rapid, accented English.  I have rarely wanted to disappear more keenly (and trust me, that’s an emotion I experience a lot).

My childhood was as full of farewells as it was of blindingly bright experiences.  I saw countries and cathedrals and I also cried my eyes out, missing friends in Cambridge, in Paris, in London.  I went back and forth across the ocean so many times I wasn’t really sure, for several years, where home was.  I would never trade my childhood, and the unique terroir in which I grew (shared only by my sister).  But it was certainly full of dislocation, threaded through with a fundamental sense of discomfort.  I was always new somewhere, or about to leave.  The fabric of my life was woven through with departures.

I don’t know why this has been on my mind lately.  Maybe it is because I am particularly cognizant of how comfortable my adult life is, how different Grace and Whit’s childhoods are from mine.  After our trip to Jerusalem last year, I reflected that my sister and I had had seemingly opposite responses to our shared childhood.  I am the unadventurous one.  I have always chosen safety and comfort.

And yet.  The thing is, I still feel uncomfortable a lot of the time.  It’s not the same uneasiness that comes with being in an unfamiliar country: different coins (oh, how many times have I offered a palm full of foreign money to a bus driver and asked them to take what they need?), different names of dish soap, different kinds of foods.  But it is a vague sense of discomfort in my own life.  There are not that many people who feel like native speakers of my language.  There are not many places that I feel entirely accepted.  I long to belong.

I used to think that it was my childhood of constant goodbyes that created this feeling of fundamental otherness.  Years ago I described the way all those “departures remain within me, hard little kernels of sadness that the rest of my experience flows around, but not undisturbed.”  But maybe that’s not it.  Maybe it is actually the other way around.

Perhaps for too long I’ve incorrectly ascribed responsibility for the way I am to my peripatetic childhood.  Maybe this is my essential self, this nose-pressed-against-the-window sensation simply my way of being in the world.  It’s the reason I take the pictures.  It’s the reason I am often misconstrued as aloof and chilly.  I guess it is just part of who I am, for better or for worse.

Numbered Days

Cranes10

Right now I feel incredibly keenly aware of how finite these particular days are.  I’m already more than halfway through my years with Grace living at home.  How is this possible?  I’m already seeing Whit blush when I kiss him goodbye on the playground.  They still hold my hand when we cross the street, but for how much longer?  Mere minutes.

A while ago I wrote a post about things whose days are numbered.  Almost all of those things are gone now, and even reading that piece brings hot tears to my eyes and a tightness to my throat.  These days are sliding through my hands even as I try to grasp them.

The truth is that all our days numbered.  Every hour is running out as we revel in it.  Isn’t that the very definition of life?  So maybe the intensity with which I long for these days even as I live them is about the fact that I so passionately adore this season of my life.  The aching loss that’s threaded through every hour is simply the flip side of the deep love I feel for right now.  I have never had one without the other, and they seem to be directly correlated.  The more joy I feel in a moment, the more pierced I am by my knowledge of its swift passage.

I’ve made some difficult decisions lately that reflect this growing sense of how limited are these sunlit hours.  What I want is more days at Crane’s Beach, more long notice-things walks, more evenings reading Harry Potter with my children curled beside me, listening raptly. I want to be here right now, this ten year old, this eight year old, this very early spring.

But I can’t have this without letting go of other things.  It is hard for me to admit that I have to choose.  This is the difficult, unavoidable truth of something I have long maintained: our only true zero-sum resource is time, and how we allocate this, our true wealth, is a direct representation of what we most value.

And I choose those three people in the picture.  Above all else.

Doubt

winter branches

Winter morning light on bare, snowy branches: one of the things that makes me feel most powerfully a sense of mingled doubt and faith.

I think I’ve decided that I won’t have a word this year.  But if I was going to have one, it’s pretty undeniable what it would be.  The word doubt has been presenting itself to me for the last several weeks.  Insistently, even.

There was this quote, which I saw on the wall of a dear friend’s house right before Christmas:

“Who never doubted never believed; where doubt, there truth is.  It is her shadow.” – Philip Festus

Naturally, these words reminded me of Anne Lamott’s famous line, which I think of at least daily:

“The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.” – Anne Lamott

And then Ronna Detrick, long a spiritual guide and teacher to me, wrote about doubt recently.  Her words reverberated around my head and heart with an undeniable familiarity, with the clanging echo of something I should listen to.

I keep returning to one image, which is of the way I can navigate my house in the dark.  Whether it’s going to the bathroom in the middle of the night or walking around the basement when the lights flicker off by accident, I know exactly where things are.  I know how many steps it takes to get here, where to put my hand, when I need to duck.  This house, where I’ve lived for eleven and a half years, is as familiar as the back of my hand, its contours and lengths so well known I can move among them with my eyes closed.

I always thought of that as some kind of manifestation of my comfort with doubt, that sense of familiarity with the dark, of being able to navigate without clarity.  Doubt, which I know so well, which fits me like a well-worn shirt.  Doubt, which keeps presenting itself to me these days, over and over.

But maybe that is just the other side of faith?