Allowing time/one thing at a time
Good use, in the Alexander sense, is an attitude, a way of being, an endless exploration. It’s possibility instead of position, curiosity not correction. Our sense of time, and how we use ourselves in time, can shift from fraught to exploratory, from compressed to expansive, once we undo the habit of limited time.
We can easily observe the experiential effects of telling ourselves “I have time” as contrasted to “I don’t have time”. Collect your own data, beginning with low demand activities (rising from a chair) to increased demand activities (catching a bus). We can take the time to allow time for a new experience. This does not mean freezing or even “slowing down”. It only takes a micro-second to allow the time for a new response, a new means, a new solution. This is what lessons are all about: allowing time to pursue even basic activities in a different manner.
In the same temporal theme, multi-tasking (doing more than one activity at a time) is presented as a solution to rising demands of living. If we pursue multi-tasking , we have agreed to end-gaining as a means to accomplish “more” at the expense of the lessening of our entire neuro-physical response, a whole elastic system of attention developed over millennia. One thing at a time is how we work best.
When I’m walking, I am walking. Of course I can think or talk with my walking companion, and listen to birds, and see the sights of the world. I am designed to take in sensory data as I move through time and space. If I am walking while listening to a podcast or music, I am missing the sounds of the world that are my context for being. If I am doing a household chore and “distracting” myself by listening to a book, I am not attending to either activity. I am not allowing time and am attempting to do more than one thing in time. I have fractured my possibilities and limited curiosity to the outcome of achieving more.
We are mortal. Time is what we have, and attention is how we spend our precious coin of time. We can drain our time with hurry or by splitting our attention. But time won’t be retrievable once it’s gone. We’ve spent it in curiosity or correction, in possibility or position, in false certainty or amusing surprise.
We have time to allow time
