Chasing Two Hares

Our quote of the day comes to us via Gretchen Rubin at The Happiness Project, and falls under the category of ancient wisdom for modern times:

"He who chases two hares will catch neither."
 -Publius Syrus

I've written before about the false promise of multitasking, the seductive idea that we can do more in less time by doing two (or more!) things at once.  The truth, unfortunately, is that our brains aren't wired that way.  Modern brain research continues to discover that human attention cannot be divided and still perform at the highest level.  We are fooling ourselves if we think we are boosting our output by multitasking.

Publius Syrus figured out in the first century BC what our modern scientists are explaining in detail today:  if you want to catch two hares, you have to start by catching one hare.  Chasing two at a time will not get you to your goal faster.

Have a long to-do list?  Pick the most important item that you can do right now, and do it.  Then move on to the next one.  Don't be tempted to do more than one thing at a time--you'll get more done, and what you do will be done better, and you'll be happier for it.

More to Life than Work

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Emily Esfahani Smith tells about how her mom's advice to collect a boyfriend as well as a degree while at college proved to be the right advice.  While the assertion that meeting a partner while in college is easier than in the post-college yearsbis interesting to discuss, I thought Ms. Smith's more important point came somewhat later in the essay:

There is far more to happiness than career success.

Ms. Smith is blessed to have learned at a young age what many of us discover more slowly over a much longer time, often after it is too late to save a marriage, or participate in a child's milestones:  there is more to life than work.  A successful career can certainly be one important component of a happy life, but it is never the only component, and often not the most important one.

For women especially, Ms. Smith points out, a lifetime of being told you can achieve anything often translates into pressure that you should achieve "everything", whatever that means.  But in truth, says Ms. Smith:

Career success and relationships are both undoubtedly important to women's happiness, but many young and ambitious women value their personal lives more than their career aspirations. And that feeling intensifies over time.

I'm hardly qualified to explore the various feminist arguments for or against her point, but I'm glad she made it because I think it offers a worthy reminder for all of us, men and women, to not get stuck with a one-track life that never leaves the career track.  By all means be proud of your professional accomplishments, but never forget that a "personal life" is much more than just achievement--it is the people you choose to spend time with, and the relationships you develop with those people.

Restart

After several months of working on other projects, I have recently turned my thoughts back to Present Tense Living and the need for proper perspective about the time of our life.  Prompted partly by the hectic nature of my own family’s life—four school-aged children and all their activities can certainly fill up a schedule—and partly by lots of media attention on the issue of “balance” following the recent publication of books like Lean In, I have been reminded that a regular dose of perspective about how we use the time we have is still important.

I begin by reminding myself:  what exactly is present tense living?  At its most basic, “living in the present tense” means being thankful for the day you have in front of you—today—and making the most of it.  Do the task you have to do today with purpose; love the people you encounter today with abundance; appreciate the experiences you have today with gratitude.  Too often, much of our daily existence is taken up with lamenting the past or worrying about the future.  It is good to learn from the past, and to prepare for the future, but when those activities dominate our thinking, we can miss out on the pleasures of today.  This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it!

So as I look around my upper-middle-class American environment, do I see people living in the present tense?  Are we enjoying the people, places, and things that already surround us, or are we focused on the chase after more and different people, places, and things that might make us happy in the future?

Some of what I see is good.  Certainly many of us realize how fortunate we are to have come through the Great Recession with our jobs intact—especially in my field of banking.  The job we have may not be the perfect one, but compared to no job it is pretty good.  Some of the conspicuous consumption that drove so much spending before the recession has cooled off—we now realize that everything doesn’t have to be brand name all the time.

But the busyness of life, the speed at which we seem to be passing through our days, continues unabated and is probably still accelerating.  We continue striving to do more in less time; the mistake of multi-tasking is till rampant; the pressure to be “always-on” continues unabated; the temptation to upgrade and update is stronger than ever.  For example, I have a wired phone in my basement at home that is around 10 years old and works great, exactly like it always has.  By comparison, a 2-year-old cell phone (if you’re willing to be seen with one) seems quaintly outdated, and a 5-yr-old one probably doesn’t even work on a modern network.  We are encouraged to upgrade nearly every year, whether we need it or not.

None of the stuff we are pursuing is bad in itself.  The problem comes when we are running after it only because everyone else is, so that after awhile we can't remember why we started running, or how we ended up in this race.  Present Tense Living encourages us to pause to appreciate what we already have; maybe we don’t need to run quite so fast anymore to catch something we aren’t sure we want anyway.  Be deliberate about what you do; you want to follow the path you set, not the one your culture sets for you.  Money and stuff are nice, but they aren’t the point.  Relationships, experiences, memories—REM—will give you a much richer life.

As the recent excitement over books like Lean In shows, there is still a strong cultural push to “have it all” in America.  Our goal at PTL is not to tell you that you can’t have it all; our goal is to remind you (1) not to overlook the blessings of what you already have, and (2) to be deliberate about the “all” you are pursuing—it should be the “all” that you define, not the “all” that the world defines for you if you let it.

So ask yourself:  what am I so busy pursuing, and why?