Multi-tasking is not something I am proud of, but is what I find myself constantly doing to keep my life organized and on track. For instance, at present I am sitting in on my son's violin lesson while I answer emails and attempt to blog, whilst thoughts of making school lunches and my daughter's readiness for bed invade my concentration.
I go back and forth between taking notes for my son's violin lesson and this blog, making a concerted effort to stay in one tense: the present. (A couple of days ago I wrote about my propensity for writing in a myriad of time zones. There. I just used the past tense. Oh well!)
Time! I can't seem to get enough of it: I'm fascinated by it, enslaved by it, just like everybody else in this perpetual-motion-forward, results-oriented world. No wonder I love reading books where my sense of time can be "lost", or that I confuse my tenses in my writing, and that I am drawn to writing as a means of making sense of the past, exploring the future, and finding out what I believe in the present.
Here's a cliché for you: If you have one foot in the past and one foot in the future, then you are pissing on the present. But writing teaches me that everything informs and builds on everything else! Why must I beat up on myself for multi-tasking and mixing up tenses? If I truly want to appreciate the moments I am really present, I need to give myself a break for being only human.
Let's make a pact: Let's celebrate all of it together, all of the moments of messy multi-tasking as well as the purely present moments. Let's go hog wild and forgive ourselves and each other for past mistakes.
Now, if that could only translate to finishing my novel . . .
