I don’t care what anyone says, it is not possible to multitask!

When I first bit down hard on the inside of my lip while eating I hardly noticed. I was absorbed in some other task at the same time. But when it kept happening the pain called to me and I had to pay attention.

Yes, I teach and practice and write about meditation and mindfulness. Yes, I try to be a model for my students. Yes, I am merely human, not perfect and just another student myself. Sometimes it takes a little bodily pain to snap me back into the moment and remind me to pay attention to every small moment of life, and, in this case, every small bite of food.

As a self-employed writer and teacher, and now a self-published author, I am always writing, if only in my mind. Creating ideas, characters, scenarios and plots, teasing out story lines and rewriting again and again fills my days and my imagination. I love it all. Add to that the business of writing, teaching my classes and coaching my clients, my waking life is full and dynamic. The recent decision to self-publish my fiction put me on a steep learning curve and since the monetary rewards have not yet kicked in, I took a part time office job to help pay the bills and take some of that worry off my shoulders. It is the first time I’ve worked outside of my home office for someone else in 16 years.

Overnight my life went into super drive. I had to keep doing everything I’d been doing and find 15-20 more hours in the week to step out of my routine without sacrificing my serenity and those precious, quiet, undisturbed hours I need to devote to my writing process (more about that in another post).

I don’t care what anyone says, it is not possible to multitask!

The first task that was compromised with my new schedule was eating. With no forethought I simply began to do other things while I ate: talk on the phone, prepare for a bike ride, answer emails… I quickly stopped paying attention to what I was eating, how I was eating and why I was eating. I was just shoveling food in my mouth to get it done and move on. Then I started to bite down on my lip as I was inattentively chewing. Whenever I put a forkful of food in my mouth before finishing the previous bite I’d bite down on my lip. It hurt each time.

The pain would snap me into the moment, I’d take a breath, chew mindfully for a few bites, get distracted by something else and do it again.

After a few days of this my lower lip was sore and my overbite was creating a bigger problem, causing me to bite down on that spot even when I wasn’t eating. It occurred to me that if only I had had my teeth straightened when I was younger I wouldn’t be having this problem. But I also knew that was my denial searching for an excuse and a reason to not change my behavior.

I soon realized that I was saving no significant time by eating mindlessly, I was hurting myself and giving short shrift to whatever I was doing while eating. So I slowed down, returned to eating mindfully and doing one thing at a time. And voila! my lip healed.

Maybe we can all chew gum and walk at the same time, but we cannot savor the doing of either activity or truly know what it is to do either unless we pay attention. As Buddha might say: when walking, just walk. When eating, just eat. By doing this we can be fully awake in each moment and avoid getting a fat lip.