Today I needed to self-motivate hard to get dinner done. Simple dinner but everything needed doing quickly and then to be served quickly.
I put on Snow Crash and listened to the whole “deliverator” sequence and powered through the work at a high rate of speed. It's such a beautiful first chapter.
It helps that the first time I heard it, I was in a bad rut and a friend came over and simply started reading it aloud to me.
The rhythm, the vocabulary, the meanings expressed through words that are new to the reader but immediately make sense because of the way they sound and feel.
That rush of energy. The intensity of the focus on the job and the soft disdain for every other job and every other person. It helped me feel alive and connected to the act of cooking and doing a “menial” and “trivial” task as though my life depended on doing it right and in time.
Sometimes mindfulness on a single task simply does not fit into my lifestyle of living by my values. Last night I caught myself applying lotion to my skin while I was brushing my teeth. I thought that I should really slow down and focus on one task at a time. Laughing I heard the voice that says, “where there's a should, there's a manager” because it's true.
Just as I finished up, P opened the bathroom door because she needed help using her refresher. If I'd done each task sequentially I would not have gotten one of those tasks done at all.
Any tool is useless.
I can get the most expensive sewing machine in the world, set it up perfectly in a room full of gorgeous fabrics and matching threads, and shut the door for a hundred years. When I come back there will be a dusty room full of dusty fabric and a machine that needs a serious clean up before it will be useful again.
If I have the most expensive sewing machine in the world and I have to go out and help a friend change a tire on the side of the road that machine is going to do very little for me other than maybe block traffic.
If I insist on bringing that machine with me everywhere I go just in case I might need to sew something out in the wild, I'm going to spend all of my energy on lugging the machine around and managing access to a power source. That might mean dragging a generator with me, or maybe solar panels.
I'm putting all of my energy maintaining a tool that is not actively serving me.
If I really need to sew something I can make a needle and I can pull a thread from my clothing.
Being able to use the tools at hand, or to fashion tools from what is at hand is far more effective and sustainable than trying to keep every tool that I might ever possibly need with me and functional at all times.
The mindfulness of doing one task at a time can be a great exercise for some people to use some times. For those of us who are neurodivergent or who have more things to get done in a specific set of time it's possible that mindful multitasking, or parallel working, or scientific method might be a similarly useful tool. But any time the tool becomes more important than the job, I think it might be time to step back, pause, and revisit values and goals.
Sometimes it's all about using someone else's narrative to help me get a new perspective on my situation. Sometimes it's about challenging my ability to do multiple things at the same time. Sometimes it's about finding a place where I can essay in peace without worrying about who is going to play at calling me on things or second guessing my lived experience. I need a break from that.
And that's why I'm pulling out my familiar tool of the essay in a new space under a new name and keeping everything public for now. Because I need to scream into the void and I can't do that if I'm walking on eggshells.
I know this tool and I love this tool and while it's not always the right tool for the job it exists only in my mind and doesn't take up much space even there.
All tools are useless, and the right tool for the job is priceless.