It involves concentration on the task alone - even excluding issues of the way in which it is being done. If I am peeling vegetables, say, then I need to concentrate on peeling each item. I am not peeling it to make it part of a meal or particularly tasty; I am peeling it just to peel it. When I finish one item, I move on the the next.
It is a difficult practice to perfect. And it's made doubly difficult by our modern life which contains endless distractions. Do you listen to the radio while doing other tasks? Or have TV on "in the background?" These distractions ruin any chance of being present at the task in hand. I find it helpful too, to work slowly. Rushing something keeps me from being fully attentive.
Try turning everything off when you're doing something and concentrate on what you're doing and you might find pleasure in menial tasks that seem like chores.
As a postscript to this, that same evening I read a daily meditation from Awakening by De Mello:
When a guest volunteered to do the dishes, the Master asked "Are you sure you know how to do dishes?" The guest protested that he had been doing it all his life. Said the Master, "I have no doubt of your ability to get them clean. I only doubt your ability to wash them." Explaining later to his disciples, the Master said "there are two ways to wash dishes: to wash them in order to make them clean or to wash them in order to wash them." When it was obvious they hadn't understood he added, "In the first action, your mind is asleep because it is fixed on the goal of clean dishes; in the second it is alive, because your mind is where your body is."
I find it difficult to do things anyhow different to the way you're suggesting... I'm either doing something or I'm not and intensely dislike attempts to distract me from the task at hand - a tendency which occasionally causes discord at home when I simply don't notice my better half talking to me because my attention is fully upon what I'm doing.
ReplyDeleteMaybe ASDs are actually a desirable state of being in some ways?
@Richard
ReplyDeleteNot sure about desirable - it's a pretty dodgy spectrum to be on. Having some symptoms, I have to work hard to relate to other people's feelings, which is a bummer. Also, I wonder if being incapable of doing anything other than focus on the here and now would create the same state of being. Do we need to focus in order to reap the benefit?
If I ever find out, I'll tell you! ;-)
ReplyDeleteI suspect not, as you're not performing the exercise...
As for other people's feeling, half the time I don't know where my *own* feelings suddenly came from as they just 'appear' and doesn't always correlate with any input I'm aware of - so I'm not entirely sure what feelings are appropriate to the moment, having possibly failed to recognise there was a moment at all... despite part of me having just reacted to it. Most odd...