Claire Conger

I lie on the lawn trying to hold down the Sunday funnies on a bright, windy Santa Anna morning. I love these Santa Anna days with the air charged with electricity. I can’t read the funnies indoors: I must maximize the day and take the paper outside where I can steep myself in this glorious energy.

It isn’t working. The paper blows and it’s hard to hold down—I need my arms to prop up my shoulders and there’s not much left for holding onto the paper. I give up and go into the house.

I am ten years old and already I’ve got it in my mind that I must maximize everything. I must multi-task.

I’ve lived most of my life believing whatever I have is not enough. This manifests as a feeling of tightness in my brain. Recently I’ve begun letting it go in small doses. For example, at mealtime if I set aside my reading material and clear the table, I feel a comfortable clearing in my head. Trying to enjoy two things at once, the reading and the food, I’m enjoying neither.

This sensation of tightness in my brain I’ve associated with defensiveness—I’m defending myself against boredom by eating and reading at the same time. But it’s also a sensation of aggression—I’m aggressively trying to maximize my experience.

It didn’t occur to me that this sensation is a feeling of aggression until I read Oprah’s interview with Pema Chodron in which Ms. Chodron quotes Chogyam Trungpa from his book The Myth of Freedom: “We all experience negativity—the basic aggression of wanting things to be different than they are.” (page 73)

So does it follow that multi-tasking is negative? When you’re multi-tasking you’re going from one thing to another and back again—your mind isn’t focused on two things at once; one task goes on autopilot.

Maybe what’s negative is putting the activity in front of you on autopilot instead of letting it absorb your full attention. You might as well give it the attention it deserves: A task on autopilot may get it done faster, like eating while you read, but what’s the point of doing it if you don’t experience it?