Probably not news to anyone but I tend towards busy then bust! If I lived in the pages of a Vogue Living magazine, I would of course have a stunning Japanese water feature located somewhere centrally in my work space & abode to antidote this very Western madness but alas… instead what I have is one very slow water filter tap!!
I can hear my disgruntled kids filling their water bottles everyday, exclaiming loudly about how slow the tap is, finding clever ways to prop up their bottles at precarious angles underneath it so they can continue to multi-task in the midst of the morning rush. In sharp contrast, I find that the long full 2 minutes it takes me to refill my glass at the sink, offers an unexpected oasis, 2 minutes of stillness, a cognitive break in the broadcast in an otherwise frantic schedule.
I like to just stand and wait.
It is this frequently repeated 2 mins of enforced stillness that punctuates my whole work day. In fact I find I often have an overwhelming desire for more water at the beginning of a new task at my desk, at the peak of difficulty in a complex project and before I go into a big phone meeting. My trips to the water filter are not so much driven by thirst of course as they are by the unconscious recognition of my need for a 2 min reboot, or clearing or quiet.
One of the most extraordinary things I learnt many years ago about smokers, is that when you dig down to the real guts of what keeps smokers smoking, there is much that can be attributed to the same ‘2 minutes of stillness’ model. We all need it – and we’ll use whatever means we can to get it!
Another cup of coffee? A trip to the fridge? A mind-numbing scroll through Facebook??
Ok so I don’t have a Japanese water feature to facilitate my moments of stillness, just a very slow water filter tap – but it works and hey it could be worse right? And the next time I hear one of the kids screaming with in-credulousness about how anything in this day and age can possibly be so slow and demand so much of their time and attention…do you think I should suggest embracing the opportunity for stillness?
No, you’re probably right 😉