While in college I worked at Cox's Department Store selling Men's Furnishings -- shirts, socks, ties and belts. We also sold underwear, but that didn't take a lot of "selling." During the training phase of my employment, I remember how insistently the manager told me that an actual customer in front of me took priority over a prospective customer on the phone. I thought he was right about that ordering, but the philosophy, I suppose, could be debated. The point, however, is that there was no mystery as to how I was to handle contests for my attention. Unfortunately for our culture, we don't have life managers who will provide the same service. As a result, we fall prey to the presumption that every knock on our figurative door is equally important. If the phone rings, we answer it even if we are already engaged in a conversation with someone else. If we receive a text, we read it -- and likely respond to it, never mind that we happen to be driving.
Someone recently told me of being in the company of an individual whose cell phone began to ring. Worried that the recipient wasn't hearing the summons, my friend asked, "Aren't you going to answer that?" To which the other replied, "No; I carry that phone for my convenience, not everyone else's."
A recent article in the New York Times reported on the practice of some ultra wealthy to "...part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms." And then there are those, the writer goes on to observe, who "pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago."
We have become expert, the author ultimately hints, at sensing what is new, but not what is essential. Maybe we have lost the ordinary and common art of simply asking the question. Modern brain research refutes the much-beloved premise of "multi-tasking." Our brain, if the scientists know what they are talking about, can't ultimately attend to multiple things at once; it simply becomes speedier at shifting back and forth. That, it seems to me, is a sure recipe for superficiality. In the course of our multi-tasking dizzyness, careful assessment and thoughtful evaluation -- essential components of prioritization, along with basic life and relational values -- are abandoned in service to simple attendance. Stimuli come our way, and we duck and dodge or, as is more commonly the case, allow them all to strike us full in the face regardless of how trivial or secondary they may actually be.
By contrast, one of Stephen Covey's principles for enhancing effectiveness is expanding the gap between stimulus and response -- something our grandmothers taught us in their admonition to "count to ten" before reacting. Scripture uses the larger language of sabbath to beckon us off the merry-go-round, less for simple rest -- although that never hurts -- than to regain orienting perspective.
Some things are, after all, more important than others. Which brings me back to that ringing phone, why we carry it, and how we will ever figure out who the actual customer is in front of us. I'm not at all sure of the answer to that question, but on your way to figuring it out for yourself try this: next time yours begins to ring, check the caller ID. If the caller happens to be me, feel free to finish whatever it is that you were doing. You can, after all, always call me back.
1 comment:
Well done sir! Glad you are writing again. I quote you often.
Mike
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