One night, as the temperature dropped to the 40’s,I recalled a story I once read in Rabbi Larry Kushner’s book. On a cold night in Massachusetts, as he was looking at the burning wood in his fireplace,his thoughts wandered to the biblical story of the burning bush. He tried to figure out how long you would have to watch wood burn before you would know whether or not the wood was actually being consumed? When he realized that even dry kindling wood is not burned up for several minutes, he came to think that the real miracle in the Bible was not that the wood wasn’t consumed, but that someone (Moses) would spend so many minutes looking at that fire.
Do many of the problems that we witness today stem from the fact that we no longer really focus on one thing? We don’t take the time, nor give enough attention, to fully appreciate something – we are always proudly multitasking. But the real problem is that multitasking is a myth. Earl Miller, a professor of Neuroscience at MIT, says that humans can’t focus on more than one thing at a time. “Switching from task to task, you think you’re actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you’re actually not.” All we do is quickly shift our attention from one item to another.
Even the popular idiom that teaches us to appreciate all that is good in our life: “count your blessings”, stirs us in the wrong way. When it comes to blessings, we must be fully aware of them, be grateful and find ways to utilize them – counting them is just not enough. It is akin to a wealthy person who counts his or her money regularly, but never uses it to make his/her life, or the life of others, any better.
Our children are born with the amazing ability to fully appreciate things, but the modern way of life robs them of this gift. When my six year old son gets a new LEGO toy, he is fully absorbed in the whole process, from the moment he opens the box until the project is fully assembled. However, this Chanukah, he received fourdifferent models of Star Wars LEGOs. After he went to sleep, I went to his room to check on him andsaw four opened boxes of LEGOson one side of the room and on the other side a container full of the parts – but nothing was built. What happened?
My anger turned quickly to guilt. Normally, when our children receive many gifts in a short period of time (on birthdays or holidays) they first read the cards, unwrap the gifts, make a list of who gave what for the thank you notes, choose one or two presents to use immediately, and then we, the parents, assume control and decide when to allow them to use more. We didn’t do it with the LEGOs. When I asked my son the next morning why he didn’t build anything, he simply answered that he could not find the parts since they are all mixed up in the container.
He was imitating the behavior of the adults in his life. Instead of focusing on one project at a time, he was trying to juggle four. He was counting his presents, but wasn’t immersed in them. In one of his most important teachings, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel asserts“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement…get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” Learning to be in awe of the wonderful things around us, to bring back radical amazement to our life, will help us deal with issues ranging from stress to envy. The way to start is to follow Moses’ example – pay full attention to one thing for more than just five minutes.