Singling things out
On doing one thing at a time.
I don’t know how to not be “efficient.”
When I warm up food in the microwave for two minutes and 30 seconds, I also fill up the dishwasher.
If I am boiling water for tea, I also wipe the counters.
Have to drive somewhere? Listen to an audiobook to ‘maximize’ time. Cooking? YouTube video. Going for a walk? Throw on a podcast.
I’ve learned to let noise, and not silence, fill my time. Literal noise through auditory stimulation, but also the noise of multi-tasking.
And it’s become chronic.
Because what comes with the discomfort of doing one thing at a time, even something as mundane as filling up a glass of water, is not just the need for the stimulation of multitasking, the need to know I’m being ‘efficient,' but also the sense that somehow, I am wasting my time, and therefore, my life.
Except, in doing all of this, I’m actually doing the opposite.
When your day is lived in rushed mode, so is your life. Your sense of time warps, and your days feel shorter and shorter, yet you are left more tired, more dull, more collapsed inward. Years pass by blurringly fast.
There’s also the dopamine conundrum: doing things fast, with a sort of adrenaline rush, feeds a certain desire to live life fast. It pumps you full of an almost addictive concoction of fast-burning self-destruction, that can only be stopped in its tracks when you burn out.
Which is exactly what happened to me.
Now, I’m forcing myself to slow down, intentionally trying to “chill,” and yet, old habits creep up constantly.
If I sit still with a cup of tea, I tell myself I should be reading a book, crossing off titles on Storygraph book challenges and my own TBR. When I cook, I tell myself I should maximize my time by listening to an audiobook.
It’s draining, it’s constant, it’s addictive, and it’s destructive.
Slowing down, oddly, takes more energy than living fast and furious, it seems. It takes more wherewithal to consciously take things one at a time.
Of course, this brings up all sorts of questions, such as how and why I got to this stage, and how our American capitalist, consumerist, productivity-designed, and efficiency-obsessed culture that is built on a conveyor belt of existence leads to everything I’ve mentioned.
It’s been a trying year so far in learning how to slow down, be still, and be content with “enough.” Some days, I do quite well, and other days, especially when anxiety or worry about other aspects of my life creep in, my old habits do, too, as if to both comfort me with hedonistic speed and also distract, and perhaps numb, me to my anxiety.
It’s a back and forth I’m still trying to find the balance in.
But as I’ve written elsewhere, I do think many of us are getting to this point, and I hope it leads to a societal shift, where we recognize and work collectively to get to a point of more stillness.
One thing I’ve found helpful is telling myself “it’s enough,” that things I have done, or not done, are enough to have lived a day of my life. And I remind myself, or try to, often that doing less, slowing down, giving my brain space, is healthy, in fact, necessary for creative and intellectual growth. That in slowing down, I am doing myself one of the greatest favors I can: giving myself more time.