Thursday, September 22, 2011

One Thing At A Time

The reading for class this morning was on "one thing at a time."

"Multi-tasking is the antithesis of yoga."

Yoga is about focusing the mind on one thing for an extended period of time, not about putting the mind here and then dragging it over there, while tossing it up over there, and shoving it down there. And this is what we often do.

We live in a society that emphasizes productivity, as though your self-worth is contingent on what or how much you can get done. We are convinced that we need to cram our agendas full of meaningless and trivial acts to prove our value and that we need to "keep up with the times." Smart phones are the epitome of this - the commercials boast about how we can surf the web, be on a phone-call, send a text message, and drive to the date we are running late for all at once. This is something that society has convinced us we want...? This to me, implies that we cannot handle or run our own lives without these ridiculous little devices showing us the way.

So we eat fast, we drive fast, we shop a lot, we spend a lot, we fanatically explore all the ways that we can be in more than one place at once, we can keep up with everybody at once, and we can get more done faster. A conclusion similar to the one I came up with in another recent post: sometimes less is more, pulling back is the only way to move ahead. "One thing at a time, and when in doubt, first things come first."

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