mustitasking is a moral weakness?

I think that this phrase makes good shock copy but as I slowed down myself in Lent this year I began to reflect on this slogan of the slow movement. One of my actions was that when I ate alone, I would concentrate on eating without doing something else as well, like watching tele or listening to the radio or reading a book or a newspaper. I have been an inveterate multitasker [women readers please note!] driven often by the evangelical notion of 'redeeming the time'. So this action was to break a long-standing habit backed by a spiritual imperitive. One of the reasons for doing it, though, also went back to the commendation of a former spiritual director of mine, who suggested that as I am a MBTI 'N', that it may do me spiritual good to do something in an 'S' manner, and the specific suggestion was to eat slowly and taste, smell and feel my food as I ate: to attend to the sensations of eating. I found it interesting to note how hard this could be; my mind would wander into woolgathering, and even the lack of outside-driven multitasking agents did not stop my inner chatter crowding out the simple sensations of eating over time. I guess that it would be a matter of practicing to attend to simple sensations for increasingly longer periods of time ...

However, be that as it may, I got to thinking about 'multitasking is a moral weakness'. It needs to be taken as a challenge, not an absolute truth. We rely on various forms of multitasking to live: our brains need to control all sorts of automatic and semi automatic actions unconsciously in order to make sure that we can attend to potentially life-threatening situations without simple control being compromised [eg not having to consciously think about brakes or steering while deciding how to avoid a tricky road situation is a decided advantage in aiding sufficiently rapid responses]. Also, it is not a moral weakness for me, in a pastoral interview, to be listening to someone's words and also their body language while assessing whether these match up with the content of their words and indeed assessing whether we have the time to complete processing the new information before our time runs out and the kids return from school, say ...

What is being challenged is the idea that busyness is somehow automatically a good thing. Maggi Dawn quotes a useful piece from 'In Praise of Slow':

The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between. Being Slow means never rushing, never striving to save time just for the sake of it. It means remaining calm and unflustered even when circumstances force us to speed up

It's an attitude that I have found needs challenging in many clergy circles. Clergy, perhaps because so much of their work is unseen of necessity, can be prone to the temptations of justification by works which tends to make them vulnerable to trying to do many things at once, multitasking becomes a proof of productivity and value and a counter in the games of moral blackmail over church work we can end up playing [we are all so busy, you can't ask any more of us] because we haven't in so many churches learned to communally value vocation and so can't or won't make decisions based on calling rather than expediency.

And yet what people most want from us is help to live the way that the quote points to.
It means reinventing the way we do church, I think.

maggi dawn: In praise of SLOW