Multi-tasking
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| 6/20/2008 |
by Ames S.
amess@sober24.com
I was walking down Broadway the other day and I saw this kid riding a
skateboard, listening to an iPod, and sending a text message on his
cell phone all at the same time.
The kid couldn’t have been more than 13 years old and I was amazed at how relaxed he seemed. Of course, as a pedestrian I was a little perturbed, not wanting to get run over, but the kid seemed remarkably agile and aware as he weaved in and out along the sidewalk.
I was on my way to the barbershop for my quarterly haircut, one I was especially looking forward to. We were in the middle of a heat wave and while I don’t really have that much hair on my head to be bothersome, the idea of gaining any leverage whatsoever on the weather was most welcome.
Sitting in the barber’s chair, wrapped in a protective smock as the clippers whirled around my head, I thought about the kid on the street and my own abilities to multi-task. Basically, I realized that when I was his age, multi-tasking consisted of drinking a few beers, smoking some grass, and throwing back a handful of pills. That was multi-tasking.
I thought about my own daughter and her ability to watch TV, talk on the phone and do her homework concurrently. It has always surprised -- and aggravated -- me to watch.
“How can you possibly be reading a history book and watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer at the same time?” I would ask, my annoyance spilling over. She would give me the “omigod you’ll never understand me” look and wave me away with one hand, surreptitiously increasing the TV volume on the remote with the other.
Eventually, I gave up. She’s doing well in school. She’s got friends. She talks to us, most of the time, and she’s not out multi-tasking like I was. But I still don’t understand it.
For me, after years of drinking, smoking, and popping pills, I ended up in a place where “Don’t drink and go to meetings” was about all I could handle. Like many, I thought that getting high would open up my life to new experiences (which, in all honesty it did: car wrecks, jail, blackouts), but ultimately, drinking and drugs had a way of shrinking my universe bit by bit rather than expanding it in any way.
My world, which had once held considerable promise, got smaller and smaller all the time. Like one of those global positioning maps from Google that start out with a shot of the globe from space and zoom in shot by shot on the continent, the eastern seaboard, New York City, the upper west side, my block, my building, my apartment, and end up with a picture of me passed out on the floor in my bathroom, everything had narrowed down to a single point.
Many years later, I still don’t have much of a capacity for multi-tasking. I guess you could call it old-school, but I kind of like that single focus, that life and death intensity. Not that I ever want to go back to the place where I’m hanging by a single thread, but there’s something invigorating about having to pay very close attention to one thing and one thing only. I guess that’s what makes AA’s Fifth Tradition so powerful. “Each group has but one primary purpose – to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.” As it says in the introduction to that Tradition in the “Twelve and Twelve,” “Better do one thing well than many badly.” So far, so good. It’s been thirty years since my last drink.
Thinking about my daughter and the kid on the skateboard, I began to feel better. It’s not that I can’t multi-task. I can when I want to. And to prove it, when I left the barbershop, I stopped in at a drug store and bought some gum. I chewed a few pieces as I walked home. That’s about as much as I can handle these days.
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