While I was pregnant, I wrote an essay on the challenge of mindfulness in a world of multitasking. A few months and a lifetime later I found myself sitting on the toilet at 3am, breastfeeding a newborn. It was then that I realized that when I wrote that essay, I had no idea what multitasking was!

Mindfulness became this sort of dreamy place that I once lived in simpler times; like the studio apartment I rented on Trumbull St. for only $700. It seemed, if not unattainable, certainly incongruent to my new world.  Not only did life suddenly move faster and change more abruptly, it lacked the ebb and flow of a balance between being and doing.  Having a baby eradicated the distinction between night and day. There was no off-season. All of my time was  “exquisitely available” to my daughter, as Claire Dederer put it in the book Poser.  The umbilical cord gone, my daughter and I remained tethered nonetheless.

Simply put, mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to everything that is happening to you from moment to moment. In mindfulness, you must bring your full awareness not just to the activity you are engaged in, but also to your inner experience of it.

This is a challenge for anyone, never mind a parent.  Multitasking is ingrained in us. Human beings have always had a capacity to attend to several things at once. In fact, I just checked my Facebook page, mid-sentence. In my defense, many evolutionary psychologists have argued that multitasking has wrongly been given a bad rap. Women evolved to multitask, they say, stirring the pot while feeding an infant (only men needed to be highly focused for hunting, or risk being the hunted). In The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter, Katherine Ellison  reviews the research that motherhood actually improves women’s minds.  Ellison’s bottom line is that having babies contributes to enrichment of the brain: the hormonal surge of pregnancy and the intense new experiences of daily interaction with their children lead to “neurogenesis” or the brain’s process of growing and changing through the development of new neurons.  According to this research, neurogenesis strengthens a number of skills, including multitasking!

“Are you sweeping or singing?” my daughter, a mindfulness native, asked me.  I, the mindfulness immigrant, was sweeping.  And singing.

Place your right hand atop your head, and your left hand at your belly. Now simultaneously, pat your head and rub your belly. Notice the cacophony of movement between your stuttering right hand atop your head, slowing, and stopping, and speeding up again, willing the left hand at your belly to circle, circle, circle!

Now try this. Start patting your head with your right hand. Keep it going. Now start rubbing your belly with your left hand. Success! The trick is to set one hand in motion, then leaving it to flow rhythmically onward, initiate the movement of the left hand at the belly. Why is this so much easier?

It is easier because multitasking does not really exist. Yes, of course we can sing and sweep at the same time; but that does not mean we can do just any two or more things at once. We can only do those things at the same time because at least one of them is automatic. Human brains, it turns out cannot do two things at once that both require thinking, without one or both of them taking a hit in efficiency or depth of thought, or both. Yet, we are regularly encouraged to do two or more things at once, and we take pride in our perceived ability to successfully multitask.

As Carl Honoré states in the book In Praise of Slowness, “we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts”. This leaves us with no space for reflection or enjoyment of the present. Scan Facebook, and you see postings, deep in the night, of mothers cooing over the ecstasy of finally just sitting in the moonlight, rocking their baby.  Am I the only one who wonders whether just sitting is still just sitting when you write about it on Facebook?

There are innumerable incentives to work harder and faster and little encouragement to slow down and experience life. If these outer forces are not enough, there are powerful inner forces that sabotage calm by thinking, judging, planning, and doing.

So what’s a parent to do?  The point is not to become a non-doer. For now, I’ll at least use this research to try to relate to my inevitable multitasking with a clearer perception of the truth of the moment.

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Peg Oliveira is a yoga teacher in New Haven (www.pegsyoga.com), a PhD in Developmental Psychology, and the mother of Willow, aged 3. Peg’s essay “Mind over multitasking: What would Buddha do?” was published in The Culture of Efficiency.  She is the founder of Elm City Flow, a nonprofit organization committed to spreading the love of yoga to underserved populations.

Peg will be leading the workshop “What Does Yoga Have to do With Parenting” at Fresh Yoga in New Haven on Sunday March 25, 2012 from 2:00 – 4:00.  Visit www.pegsyoga.com for details.

PLAY IN A DAY! 2-5:15 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23, 2011, at Neverending Books, 810 State St., New Haven. The fee for the three-hour session is $5 per child.

Play in a Day is a children’s theater project in which a classic theater script is adapted, designed, rehearsed and performed—by children, under the direction of Christopher Arnott—in a single afternoon. Parents drop off their kids at Neverending Books at 810 State Street at 2 p.m., then return at 5 p.m. to see the show.

Click here to watch videos of previous Plays in a Day

Contact Christopher Arnott at chris@scribblers.us for more details.

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Chris Arnott, a lifelong theater fan (and father of two theater-loving daughters), helps a room full of kids create their own version of a famous play. The play is chosen, planned, rehearsed and performed in a single afternoon.

This will be the eleventh Play in a Day show. It’s happening Friday, Jan. 6 ( the Three Kings Day school holiday) from 2-5 p.m. at Neverending Books, 810 State Street, New Haven.

Parents can drop off their kids at Neverending Books at 2 p.m., then return three hours later to see the show and, if they like, stick around for pizza and chat. The fee is $5 per child.

Parents are also welcome to stay if they wish. Children of all ages welcome. (In previous shows, kids as young as four and as old as 13 have participated).

Many of the previous Play in a Day shows can be viewed at http://scribblers.us/nhtj/?page_id=1500

Contact Christopher Arnott at chris@scribblers.us for more details.