I used to write
my so-called blogs over an hour or so or just over having coffee. Nowadays, I
can’t whip one up even in a week. Trying to squeeze every minute of my time to
do almost everything fries up my brain as if every bit of information around me
seems needed to be processed, digested and eventually consumed. And I stop
suddenly and ask myself – what’s the point?
I finally found
the time to finish this piece, after my wife reminded me during our brief
escapade to Hunter Valley over the weekend – “we have to pause and have a break
from the daily grind of life”.
I realised –
our brains have too many tabs open.
Talking
about their struggles with a stressful life someone said to me, ‘My problem is
that I’ve got too many tabs open in my brain.’ At the time, I thought it was
just another example of the increasing habit of using computer terms for
ordinary life as when you hear someone say, ‘Sorry, I’m in data overload mode,’
or ‘Let’s interface over coffee.’ On reflection, however, I think it says
something important.
The
background to this idea of ‘having too many tabs open’ is something that today
many of us are all too familiar with. We load a web browser (Chrome or Edge)
and open a webpage, perhaps to check our email. Then we chase up other things,
checking on weather, sports, news and then, perhaps, continue trawling around
the web as we research things, read reviews and so on, without closing any of
the previous webpages. The result is that open tabs proliferate: I gather there
are people who quite commonly find themselves with a hundred open tabs.
Eventually the browser slows down and up pops the warning: Too many browser
tabs open. It’s a computing habit that has been well studied and been found to
be bad practice. Although it may give the user the illusion of successful
multi-tasking, in reality it isn’t very productive. It leaves lots of things
unfinished, weakens the focus of the user and encourages the sort of
displacement activity where you find that you have mysteriously left a hard
activity for an easier one.
Applied to
life, having ‘too many tabs open’ is a very common phenomenon. Many of us have
lives in which there is simply too much going on and which we don’t manage in
the best way. On the screen of our existence there are far too many tabs open.
We may have one cluster of tabs to do with work: projects, trips, a forthcoming
meeting; and another cluster to do with home: that DIY job, the tidying and the
gardening. Then there are all those other collections of tabs associated with
our social life, community life, families, finances, holidays, hobbies and so
on. Matters are made worse because these are open browser tabs. They are not
some sort of static to-do list; they are live issues that we have commenced but
not completed. We have either found ourselves bored with them or been
distracted away by the call of some other tab.
In part,
this is a problem of the modern age. Life is so complicated. Today, everything
from a toaster to a car comes with a manual that is at least 10-pages thick –
and a demand that it be registered online, connected to the Internet and given
a software update. Where once we only received communications from other people
once a day when the post fell through the letterbox, now we undergo a
continuous deluge of emails, messenger chats, tweets and updates from when we
wake to when we fall asleep. Once, when we left our houses we left our
telephones behind; now they pursue us everywhere. Once we lived in a world in
which we had space in which we could think and live; now we are under pressure
to respond and react continuously.
We have too
many tabs open.
There’s a
lot wrong with this. One danger is that we find it easy to slip from those
difficult issues that we need to address into easier ones that don’t need our
attention. Another is that it’s confusing: I doubt I am the only person who
finds himself asking, ‘What exactly am I supposed to be working on now?’ It’s
also stressful. In our minds we know that these tabs are open: we can hear them
whispering for our attention. It also discourages serious thinking: after all,
you can focus deeply on a little but not deeply on a lot.
What’s the
solution? First, we need to have the humility to know our limits. It was always
a wise rule to never bite off more than you can chew and it’s even wiser in
today’s hectic world. I can well imagine that, somewhere, there’s already a
gravestone with the sad inscription, ‘He just had too many tabs open’.
Above all,
prioritise. We need to ask ourselves: do I need to do this? Do I need to do it
now? Can I do it well? I suggest we need to reflect on the following little
story in Luke’s Gospel and note its application both to our mind and spirit.
‘As Jesus
and the disciples continued on their way to Jerusalem, they came to a certain
village where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. Her sister,
Mary, sat at the Lord’s feet, listening to what he taught. But Martha was
distracted by the big dinner she was preparing. She came to Jesus and said,
‘Lord, doesn’t it seem unfair to you that my sister just sits here while I do
all the work? Tell her to come and help me.’ But the Lord said to her, ‘My dear
Martha, you are worried and upset over all these details! There is only one
thing worth being concerned about. Mary has discovered it, and it will not be
taken away from her.’ (Luke 10:38–42).
And in this
time of Lent, indeed, there is only one thing worth being concerned about.
Let’s make that priority our priority.
