Do One Thing at a Time

Do One Thing at a Time

From our friend, David Tuttle

We live in an age of multi-tasking. We feel obligated to talk on the cell phone while walking, to look at our messages while in a conversation with others, to think about a problem we are having while taking out the trash, to plan what we must do in the afternoon while eating. Life seems to go so fast and we hurry to keep up.

As an aside, the contemporary speed of living is perhaps the end result of technological advances in using electricity in more and more daily conveniences and on ever smaller scales. If you have ever experienced a power outage, after the first hour of confusion, a slower and more essential pace of life comes forth. We can breathe deeply again. This is mentioned in Chapter 45 of Beelzebub’s Tales, “In the opinion of Beelzebub, man's extraction of electricity from Nature, and its destruction during its use, is one of the chief causes of the shortening of human life.” Anyway, back to our subject and our work to be present now …

All this adds up to sleep. It is very difficult to divide our attention while doing even one activity, not to mention more than one. So, here is another “secret” of awakening – do one external thing at a time.

If we remember observing infants and young children, they give all their attention to what they are doing in the moment. “Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.”, writes Heraclitus. Being in the simple state of essence is our door to awakening, of course in conjunction with divided attention.

Gurdjieff once said, “When you do a thing do it with all self. One thing at a time. Now I sit here and I eat. For me nothing exist in a world except this food, this table. I eat with whole attention. So you must do in everything. When you write letter do not at same time think what cost laundering of that shirt – when you compute laundering cost do not think about the letter you must write. Everything has its time. To be able to do one thing at a time – this is property of Man – not man in quotation marks.”

As an experiment, set the aim to do one thing at a time for the next hour. Let us know what you observe.

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Image: Bernardino Luini, Santa Caterina.(detail)