Distraction
When I ask you a question, can I listen all the way through to your answer? If you're my kid, and you are answering something about your day, can I really intently hear what you are telling me? Or am I thinking about the fact that you should be wearing a sweater or that you need a hair cut or that I have to go meet Grandma or that we have to start dinner?When I'm talking on the phone in my office, I look at my email at the same time. So you might be telling me something really important on the phone, and I have just gotten a message from my sister that I am sort of glancing at at the same time. My voice fades out of sounding genuine and I have that weird pause in my speech pattern. I can't take in what you are saying because I'm busy reading or even replying to an email.
They say that our brains are wired only for one thing at a time. Something like that. We are able to take in only so much. We are being warned, by people who study this stuff, that if we talk on our cell phones and drive at the same time it is the same as if we were driving drunk. We are being warned that we're sort of fracturing our brains. Something like that.
I drive a highschool boy in a carpool who talks to me and text messages at the same time. I always tease him. I try to surprise him by saying something like "OH MY GOD, A HERD OF ELEPHANTS!" But he knows that I am joking and his reaction to my joke, always a beat too late because he's just finishing a message, is a tiny smile, and then back he goes. Or maybe he gets a call at the same moment.
The two girls in the backseat of this carpool are 8 and 12. The eight year old is still eager to look out the window and see what is out there. She can tell us the whole plot of a book that her brother is reading to her while we drive the South Minneapolis streets. I'm half listening, and half listening to the radio, half talking to the text messaging boy, half watching the road. Wait. That's too many halves. OH I see.
I worry all day long about how distracted I am. I interrupt myself as I ask a coworker a question. I change the subject immediately after she answers me and my mind races forward into something else.
The thing I'm trying to do is to be aware of my distracted edge. To see if I can truly draw myself back in to just thinking about one thing at a time. I'm thinking that if I can get a handle on it myself, then it will naturally be apparent to my kids. We all know that our kids have absolutely no interest in what we TALK about, or what we PROFESS. They know only what we DO. How we ACT. That's what has an effect on them. So if I can actually achieve paying attention, this might serve as a lesson to them too. It might show that I actually care about curbing my distraction.
--Nanci Olesen is making two pilots for Minnesota Public Radio about parenthood. You can check out her radio resource MOMbo at http://www.mombo.org/
posted by Nanci Olesen @ 12:55 PM
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