I like to listen to music when I drive alone. Car is like a mobile audio room; I don’t get to listen to music out of 6 speakers in my everyday life otherwise. And when I’m alone, I can crank up my favorites without imposing them on others.

But driving requires almost all my mental ability. I didn’t start driving regularly until I was 33. I did go to a driving school when I was 18, spent almost 30 hours and $3000 of my parents’ money and got a license, just like any other Japanese 18-year-olds would. But after that I lived in Tokyo, Europe, and New York City, where the world-class public transportations were available. I didn’t have to drive at all, until I moved to a suburb of Chicago with a baby and another on the way. I didn’t have the warm-up time of driving around by myself and feeling comfortable before the most precious cargo was put in my back seat. Driving started out as somewhat a nerve-wrecking activity, and it still demands a lot from me.

The American urban highway, especially, freaks me out. In Japan and in Germany, each lane has designated speed and everyone follows that rule: no passing from the slower lane, period. Here, the rule seems optional. People pass from every which way and I don’t know how many times I saw cars from both sides passing and simultaneously coming into my lane right in front of me and screamed. I’m not a slow driver, I try to be in the flow with everyone around me, but obviously I’m too slow for those who need to get there a few minutes sooner.

So I’m driving with all my nerves directed to what’s happening on the road, but at the same time I want to listen to my music. This presents a great problem. I am not very good at multitasking. I have no idea how I survived my daughters’ infancy to toddlerhood, when I assume I had to do more than one thing at a time, all the time. When I listen to music, I’d like to listen to music. I am one of those people who like “albums” and listen to the CD from the beginning to the end without skipping a song, because that’s how it’s made and I’d like to enjoy it how it is intended. But when I’m driving and listening, or at least trying to, I end up doing a lot of skipping, backwards.

While I like listening to the whole album as it flows, I do get attached to certain songs. And within those certain songs I get attached to certain words or melody lines. And this is what happens when I’m driving and listening to music at the same time:

“…The streets you’re walking on, a thousand houses long,
Well, that’s where I belong, and you belong with me,
Oh, what good is it to live, with nothing left…” Whoa! That truck was going so fast! I think the driver was texting. …Oh, no, I missed the favorite part. Back back back…

“…that’s where I belong, and you belong with me,
Oh, what good is it to liv…” Should I turn here or at the next intersection? …Oh, I missed it again. Back back back…

“…and you belong with me, 
Oh, what good is it to live, with nothing left to give, 
Forget, but not forgive, not loving…” What should we do for dinner? Chicken? Fish? Shrimp pasta? …Oh, shoot! I missed it again!

So I go back to the beginning of the song and start all over again. Then I wait and listen to the part I really like, for the sake of listening. Because I am forcing myself to listen, the pleasure of it is gone. I don’t feel the flutter of my heart, that little hick-up that I get when I encounter something that harmonizes with my wavelength. I’m as tense as Miss Daisy at the beginning of the movie. It’s like grasping a singing bowl — the up-side-down bell you strike with a small wooden mallet before prayer or meditation — in my hand, holding it tight, and striking it hard repeatedly, wondering why it doesn’t resonate.

In short, I’m not in the moment but trying desperately to simulate those peak experiences. It’ll never work, but I’m so not in the moment that I don’t even see how comical it is.

This is when I am alone in the car. You can imagine how it is when I have my daughters with me and try to have a meaningful conversation while I drive and my CD plays in the background. Every time I come across a parenting tip that tells me to use the time we spend in the car wisely and have a meaningful conversation with the children, I feel so inadequate as a parent. First of all, I can’t drive and have a meaningful conversation at the same time. It’s just too much for my cognitive capacity. Secondly, I don’t feel I am having a meaningful conversation when I can’t see the other person’s eyes. Then if my favorite part of my favorite song comes up, it’s a lost cause. My mind is all over the place and not focused at all. I get frustrated on so many levels that everything starts to feel wrong.

Then I bought my first iPhone. This device is an epitome of multitasking. I don’t ever touch it while driving (I know how deadly it would be if I started doing that), but the fact that it can do so much simultaneously is mind-boggling. You can call someone, call more people and add them in the conversation, check email, search the net, play a game, and whatever more, while you are still on the phone. Do I really need to do these all at once?

I am not good at multitasking, but that doesn’t automatically mean I am good at focusing on one thing; I have a very lively monkey mind. The Internet is an endless trap for it. I would be writing something like this, and when I want to check a definition of a word or find a synonym, I open the browser and try to go to a dictionary site I like. But the home page of my browser tells me I got a mail, so I check that first and send out some emails. Then I go back to the home page and see a headline about a huge iceberg breaking off the coast of Antarctica, and I have to click on it and read the article. When that’s done, I see another email in my inbox. Someone commented on my post, so I go to Tomo-ese and comment back. I go back to the home page and find another email, this time from Facebook. So I go to FB, check that particular post and then also what everyone has updated since last time I was there, commenting on some and “liking" others. By the time that’s done, I can’t even remember why I was online to begin with. But the worst part is that I know I was supposed to do something other than all the things I just did. Everything was done rather half-assed because of this feeling of “I’ll just finish this quickly and move on to the real thing.” And sometimes the real thing never happens.

Multitasking in this culture seems to be a skill you need to master in order to live an efficient and productive life. It seems to have the allure of desired quality you are supposed to strive for. Yesterday my 10-year-old daughter came to me and said,

“Mom, you know that people always talk about how hard multitasking is? But if you think about it, I’m talking to you right now while breathing, looking at you, thinking what to say, standing, and all that. We do several things at once all the time!” She was triumphant.

“Yes, that’s really true. Now, try only breathing,” I told her.

She looked at me as if I had said something nasty. “I can’t!”

“My point, exactly!”

I know it is a lot harder to do just one thing at a time, but I also know that it is a lot more rewarding if I can do one thing only at a time. When I am having those wow! moments — the first time I ever saw the Milky Way, the gentle breeze on my face after a strenuous hike to the top of a mountain, the silence in the meadow, the roar of the crushing waves, the last chord of an emotional symphony — I am not thinking “How do I get back to the parking lot?” or “That burger last night was sub-par.” It’s wow! because I am completely immersed in the moment. When my monkey mind starts thinking about something else, it’s gone, the wow slips away. And if the monkey mind is always busy thinking about something, I can’t find the wow in the first place.

Every little thing can be a wow. One spring morning years ago, I was standing on my front porch, soaking up the early ray. I noticed something shimmering in the air. They were long strands of the finest gossamer, each attached on one end to a branch of a serviceberry shrub and the other end flying in the air, upwards. The sun and the breeze had caught them just right at that very moment; otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed them. Wow.

I was lucky that my monkey mind was quiet at that moment. How many wows am I missing, I wonder. How blind and deaf am I to this world, to my life?

Do we feel multitasking is essential because otherwise we can’t get everything done? Could it be that we aren’t supposed to be able to get all that done to begin with? Some of my friends routinely overbook themselves and their children. They seem to multitask so they can free up some time to do more multitasking. “I feel I am missing something,” one of them said to me once, “my schedule is really crazy, I’m doing all these, but I still feel I’m missing things.” I understand the sentiment, especially when it comes to providing ample opportunities and experiences for our children. But, as my daughter realized, we are doing several things at once all the time already. How much more can we possibly do and still experience everything in full strength?

There is also this craving of mine that desperately tries to recreate the wows. The original wow was amazing, so pleasurable, I want to feel that again. There is a false sense of hope in this regard in our lives that are filled with modern technology; we can replay the music on CDs, we can take pictures and videos as things happen, we can watch the same train ride or mountain top on a TV special, and oh yes, we can TiVo that, too. Alas, the reproduction is not the real thing. When the moment is gone, it’s gone. It is possible, however, to get a wow again from the same thing. It’s just a different wow. But as long as I expect the same wow from the same thing, I’m stuck. It’s like striking the singing bowl with my hand around it tightly. And in order to notice I am holding it tightly, I have to quiet down my monkey mind and be in the moment, doing less and doing deeper.

If I loosen my grip, it might resonate. You never know when a wow strikes.

(How should I end this essay? Oh, the laundry is done; I have to fold them. What’s for dinner? Ah, someone texted me. What was the point I was trying to make in this? I got an email. The plants need water. Squirrel!)

Originally posted on Tomo-ese on March 16, 2010

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