One Thing At A Time

“Concentrate every minute like a Roman — like a man — on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can — if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Have you ever had the fortune of having a very, very, very slow computer?

I have, it’s amazing. It teaches you the virtue of which Marcus Aurelius speaks above, one thing at a time.

In my case, with my snaily laptop, I had to ask myself: OK, what do I really need to do now on my computer right now? ‘I cannot have more than two tabs open in Chrome, so I need to prioritize’. It taught me to focus on the task at hand, and how to control extreme anger. A

As much as I wanted to open Reddit or Medium, the computer just wouldn’t have been able to handle it, so I tried not to even think about it.

The same thing happens with our brains. We think we have all this processing capacity, so we find ourselves trying to do and to be everything all the time. And in doing so, we sabotage ourselves and the task at hand.