Shish-Mut-Mum

Muscle memory is one of those things that professional athletes know about. After extensive training for years and years, ones body grows into a formation familiar to the task it is has trained for.  Baseball players know exactly how to position their legs, and arms, to swing a bat at precisely the correct time to hit a roughly 3” round object that travels somewhere around 90 miles an hour. Athletes in the mixed martial arts world know exactly how to hold their arms to defend against blows, and then put their opponent off balance with the right kind of grappling technique. One hand or foot in the wrong place and you could lose your momentum, putting success at risk.

In ancient days fishermen were skilled at casting nets from their boats and worked as one to do so.  As the ships crew learned how to work together as a team, they did so with precision and talent. They learned the mechanics of where to stand in the boat, how to hold the net with the proper grip, when to let go of the net and what to do next.  When a ships crew added a new person, you could expect clumsy mishaps simply because the new persons muscle memory was still in development. More on this later.

This past week offered the chance to have muscle-memory grow in me.  Being home full-time now for 21 days has allowed me to spend more time with my kids than ever before.  What a privilege to do it! And what a respect I have for stay-at-home moms (and dads too) who do this 24/7.  Specifically, I noticed that my business skill set of forecasting, networking, negotiating and “closing” is still quite good (and very much needed to work with my kids), but the area needed for muscle-memory improvement is “Multi-Tasking”. 

In my post on April 8th (Ideas, Experiences and “Journey Bumps”) I shared about my routine being off.  My wallet was lost, someone attempted to break into my car, and other things impacted my routine.  Now, two weeks later, I think I see that this “off-routine” was really an observation of several tasks (including kids, household chores, external tasks, etc.) that needed to be managed at the same time (hence, multi-tasking).  

Now, I have always thought myself to be pretty good at managing several tasks at once. After all, that is what I’ve been doing in the business world for more than 13 years.  However, this may not be the case! Allow me to explain...

My beautiful wife, Jenn, has the blessed talent of helping our 5th grader with math, make spaghetti for dinner, and receive regular interruptions from our 6yr old, while helping our 9yr old on her science project (I believe that most young mom’s are familiar with this routine). She typically responds with genuine patience, and appears to have complete peace and control over each need that she responds to. As an “official” observer of this, it looks graceful to me: she sort of flows in and out of each need and then back again. I’m very much like this, but without the grace, patience and peace - not so much a “flowing” either...more like a clunk-n-thud from one interruption to the next. Sure, I can easily multi-task several needs, but it must be one at a time, and the need should be completed before I go on to the next task.  I guess I should call this man-tasking, and I believe that most young dads are familiar with this routine.

Essentially, mom’s that are like my beautiful wife Jenn have the real deal when it comes to multi-tasking; it is innate to them and they really know how to flow with it gracefully.  Dad’s that are like my beautiful wife’s husband, do their very best at faking it and they try very hard to keep blood pressure at reasonable level, while they thunk-n-clud their way through the multiple household tasks demanding their attention.

Listening to the homily last week, I saw how Christ’s own disciples were working on muscle memory.  Fr. Vic shared how Christ said to his disciples (who were fishing at the time), to do something outside of their comfort zone, or muscle memory: “Cast the net on the right side of the boat...” (see John 21:6 if you like).  This would have been a very backwards experience for them and probably quite clumsy.  They had a routine for casting nets on the left side of the boat, and now they are going to use different movements, and stances to throw the nets. The result of their probably awkward actions netted 153 kinds of fish (unique to the known species of fish in the sea at the time) and they could not haul it in by themselves - another boat needed to come and help with the catch. So, I can appreciate the importance of trying something different on tasks that I do routinely, and see what my “net” brings in from it.

As I experience “multi-tasking” I’m recognizing that my muscles of patience, grace and peace are just starting to break in. I’m also learning what my limits are and when to gently ask for help (or 15 minutes of quiet and a shot of something single malt). I don’t expect to have Schwarzenegger-ish Multi-Tasking Muscle Memory (or Shish-Mut-Mum for short) in the next couple of weeks, but I am grateful for the opportunity to stretch and grow some muscles that I didn’t recognize they needed to grow at all. Hopefully with enough time I will be a better person for it.  In the mean time, I’ll practice the patience bit of this by brewing some Oktoberfest. See me in about two months or so...we can taste how good patience really is.   

Oh, and by the way...my wallet? It’s found. It was in a jacket that I haven’t worn in months. Don’t ask me how...I’m still working on the grace to figure that out...