🌱 Interruptibility is a superpower - Workflows Before Rainbows

Last week, I wrote three conference abstracts while pausing about every half-sentence to interact with my toddler.

This workshop will—

“Yes, it’s a pink circle.”

—help participants to expand and apply their knowledge about—

“Oh, you want daddy to draw a circle? Okay!”

etc etc etc

I finished the abstracts in about an hour and a half. They were fine. My toddler was happy. I felt like I’d leveled up as a parent and a professional.

I’ve been thinking about how everything tells me I can only get things done in quiet, in focus mode. The idea that if I don’t have at least a half hour of dedicated silence, I might as well not even try.

My son’s daycare has been on break for part of August. Nearly all of the work I do, he is here, even if someone else is caring for him. If I believed I needed silence or noninterruptibility to work, I wouldn’t get anything done at all.

I recently read Austin Kleon’s blog post from 2018, The best thing ever written about ‘work-life balance’. He starts with Kenneth Koch’s poem, ‘You Want a Social Life, With Friends.’

Kleon writes,

I love it because unlike many when they talk about “work-life balance,” there’s no value judgment, no correct answer, just Koch laying out the choices. Work, family, or friends: pick two. You can have it all, just not all at once.

You can have it all, just not all at once.

This is what I’ve heard from others, that life is long, that there’s time enough for everything, just not all at once. But what is someone in the thick of things to do with this? Stop wanting it all?

I still want it all, although I’m prepared to concede that none of it will look how I imagined. I want it all, but I’m okay if all of it is messy.

Kleon goes on to write about a collection of podcast answers to a question about “work-life balance,” noting that of the six guests, the two men didn’t question whether work-life balance was possible, while two of the women, Kleon writes, “said they didn’t really believe in it or think about it — they didn’t see a big distinction between their work and their lives.”

He includes a lengthy quote from Eleanor Coppola, who points out that the men she knew had a studio, and spent the day there working, while women artists made their art anywhere they could, while their kid was taking a nap or at the play group. “They made it in between . . . You make art in 20-minute snatches, and you don’t, like, fiddle around.”

She continues, and it’s exactly what I needed to read:

I know one time I went to see Francis in his working room, and he had his pencils all laid out, and his espresso there, and there was this whole little ritual of getting into yourself and into your work. There was no time for the ritual of getting into your work! You just snapped into that taking 10 minutes and making 3 lines on your drawing or whatever was possible. It wasn’t the same as the way men worked. And that’s how women got their work done.

I didn’t get serious about my writing until after I’d expected not to have children, so until I gave birth to my first child—and even beyond that—I believed I needed that ritual, that uninterruptibility.

But who has access to that kind of time? Now, it seems to me that I’ve swallowed a patriarchal lie.

I’m reminded of the book At the Root of this Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst, which I was introduced to through Holly Whitaker’s critical examination of AA in Quit Like a Woman. The key point is that several aspects that are laid out as elements of many spiritual paths, such as cultivation of silence, withdrawing from the world, service, and letting go of ego, may be a tonic for folks with gender privilege and other forms of privilege, while folks who have been marginalized may already have lived familiarity with these things and might require other things—perhaps more voice, more attention to the self—to find spiritual or artistic balance.

In her newsletter this week, Ann Friedman reminded us:

This is also your periodic reminder that many of the ~great writers~ were just average guys with an above-average amount of resources and time. And, often, a singularly devoted wife serving as research assistant, caregiver, chef, and housekeeper. Ahem.

Kleon quotes Tillie Olsen:

More than any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children need one now… It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity.

I never learned about how to be interruptible.

Perhaps even how to expand or embrace my capacity for interruptibility.

I was told that mindfulness was the superpower. My ability to focus, to resist distraction.

This isn’t possible right now, but there are ways to cultivate interruptibility.

I’m learning.