A close shave – or on the dangers of multi-tasking

Sometimes I am mindful. Other times, I am less so. A few posts back I wrote about shaving as mindfulness practice. When we try to be mindful, we often catch ourselves not. Which is fine. Because if we catch ourselves, then we are being mindful. And the thing to do is to return to paying attention and being in the moment. Until we notice ourselves not. And then the thing to do is to return to paying attention and being in the moment.

One way that we make it hard on ourselves to be in the moment is to multi-task. Instead of focusing on doing one thing well, we split our attention at doing a bunch of things in mediocre fashion and best and to our harm at worst.

Case in point:  As I was brushing my teeth this morning, I was also going into the medicine cabinet getting all of my shaving stuff out. It’s a big production now. It involves toners and cleansers and soap and brushes and, of course a razor. So in the middle of getting all of this stuff out, I knocked the razor off the shelf and somehow managed to slice a centimeter of skin off of the back of my little finger on my right hand. A pint of blood (I exaggerate some) and a bunch of bandages later, I got things under control and all cleaned up. I was running late and ended up not shaving at all. I also had to stop brushing my teeth to attend to the blood. And that was hard to do, because my toothbrush has a timer and I’m a bit compulsive and it was difficult for me to stop before the timer went off. Anyhow, if I had just brushed my teeth first and shaved second, this wouldn’t have happened.

Well, hopefully this little post helps someone not cut themselves or rear-end someone, or send out an important e-mail with an embarrassing typo. Then my finger shave will not be in vain.