Simplifying Our Activities and Closing The Tabs
David Oromith · 31 minutes · recorded June 11, 2023
In this twenty minute meditation we move through the four elements in the body, then open to sight and sound before resting in a single open awareness of everything at once. David talks about the cost of doing several things simultaneously, from eating in front of the television to photographing a moment instead of living it, and suggests thinking of a busy mind as a computer with too many tabs open. He asks what activities we could simplify to make space for actually being present.
Doing several things at once feels productive, but the research David cites, from Harvard and elsewhere, found that we are far worse at it than we like to think. People who report being present with what they are doing, at work and at home, also report greater wellbeing, more happiness, more meaning and more sense of control over their lives, even where those lives look more chaotic from the outside. The difference is that they were an active participant in what was happening rather than responding on automatic while the days and weeks went by. The examples are everyday ones. Eating in front of the television and wolfing the meal down without really appreciating it. Holding a conversation with a phone in your hand. A young couple David once watched in a restaurant, who spent the whole meal looking at their baby through a camera lens and a phone screen and never once looked at the child directly. The image he offers for it is the mind as a computer with a great many tabs open: everything we are trying to think about, worry about, organise and juggle, all running at once. When something demanding comes along there is no capacity left for it. So there need to be periods when we close those tabs down and give the machine time to breathe. The question he leaves with the group is what we could simplify. What are our highest aspirations for the person we want to be and the life we want to live, and is the way we are behaving actually conducive to that.
Open presence