Slow down

I was having a conversation with someone this week about slowing down and noticing the world around us…she’ll know who she is if she reads this. As I’m listening to her talk and tell her story she used as an example, I realized something about myself — how often I don’t slow down and enjoy the moment.

I have to laugh at myself as I type this and it’s confession time — even as I type this I’m going back and forth between conversations on Facebook. I’ll type a sentence or two over here and go back to join a conversation on Facebook.

I see a problem here.

I pretty much live my entire life this way. My job requires multi-tasking, which isn’t a bad thing for the newspaper business, but I’ve let it bleed into the rest of my life. Tonight, I cooked dinner, did laundry, partially cleaned a room and chatted with several people via text — at the same time. I wasn’t giving any of those tasks my full attention. I bounced from one task to another — only partially finishing a task before I moved to another one. Somehow, the dinner was cooked (and not burned), the laundry was folded (and no wrinkles) and I managed to wrap up my conversations while adding another task — trying to figure out why the sound on the television quit working. So, at one point I was behind the TV trying to reconnect wires that had some loose and trying to calculate how much time I had before I burned my dinner. But, dinner got done, the sound now works and here I am typing a blog while keeping up with now three Facebook conversations.

See a problem here? I’m sure you’re tired just reading that. It made me tired to write it.

One of my goals this year is to slow down. Look around. Enjoy the moment. Do ONE task at a time when I’m able. While I’m proud of my ability to multi-task I don’t really ever see the moment — the small picture. It’s great to see the big picture, but the small picture is beautiful too. That’s where the birds live. The moments live. In the SMALL picture.

The saying “one thing at a time” is something I’m going to work very hard to put into practice.