Ooh, Shiny!

When we went to our first Chesterton conference one of the speakers was a man by the name of David Zach,  a Futurist.  I wasn’t sure then, and I am still not certain now, exactly what a Futurist does, but given the title, it sounded like it could be a pretty cool job. 

One of the things he spoke of was all the distractions we have in our lives.    Many of us suffer from ADOS – Attention Deficit. . . Ooh Shiny!  Himself and I were in stitches as Mr. Zach described the symptoms - easily distracted, off on a tangent, doing sixteen things at the same time and none at all. That fit me perfectly. 

I was going to surmise that as women, it’s in our nature to be that way.  However, I think I was confusing the ability to multi-task with Ooh Shiny!  As keepers of home and hearth, we need to possess an innate ability to juggle many things at the same time.  Cooking, cleaning, laundry and the such are hardly ever purely linear tasks.   And if you have kids?  Whoa!  That adds a whole other dimension.  My observation is that motherhood demands multi-tasking.

I sometimes think I have the attention span of a gnat.  If my attention is going in so many different directions, how can I do one thing well?  But then again, if I have only one thing going on, I’m bored.

There may be times when ADOS pays off.  We were enjoying an adult beverage on the patio when I glanced over at the flower pot, still filled with dead plants from last summer.  I popped up, clean it out, and ran across the yard to get the four pots of tulips I found under the pine trees.  Apparently in the fall, when I was cleaning out the church plants I brought home and stored by those trees, I had an Ooh Shiny! moment and forgot all about those tulips.

(Shiny - at 7:01)

AMDG