I’ve always been a fan of multitasking. Given my current situation, it’s good that I have practice with this. In the kitchen I’m a whiz at having 3-4 different things going on at once—I strategically think about how to get everything done so that the meal components finish up at approximately the same time, and when I’m at my best, the kitchen is also clean when the meal is finished. The trick is that you have to shift your attention to each thing at the crucial moment—the noodles can boil in peace while you prepare the salad, but if you don’t monitor them enough to know to remove them at the right time, you end up with a pot of mush. And so forth.
So cooking can be an exercise in the purposeful shifting of one’s psychological presence to various tasks. This week I’m doing a lot of emotional cooking—that is, I’m emotionally multitasking. If you think about it, we all do this all the time, every day. We can’t pour our full emotional self and all of our awareness into just one thing at a time—we literally can’t. The epigenetically crafted cognitive machine encased in that hard round thing that sits on our shoulders doesn’t even allow us to do that. The ability to adapt our energies to fit with our situations comes naturally and without conscious effort to humans (after childhood), generally speaking. Granted, some situations will be more taxing than others. For me, this week is one of those difficult times.
I’ve got the issue of my father-in-law’s health on the backburner. He made it through one pivotal moment in surviving his surgery, and now, we just wait. In the meantime, I have other emotional tasks that I have to attend to. I shift my focus back and forth. I don’t want my noodles to turn to mush.
Today, much of my emotional energy has been focused on celebrating a friendship, and grieving her departure. This dear friend of mine moves away from Lincoln this week. We met when we started our graduate program together in 2007, and fortunately, allowed ourselves to become close to each other as well as others in the program. This person has been a game-changer in my life, and the lives of so many others.
I met with this friend today for one of our sacred-yet-infamous “deep talks.” We talked about the practical, the whimsical, the theoretical. We were both very honest about how we were feeling about this transition. We’re both feeling scared and a little vulnerable. We cried together. But we’re both hopeful about the future. And even though it really hurts to say goodbye, we feel we are better people for having grown this beautiful friendship, and plan to continue this friendship from a distance for a lifetime. We commend ourselves on being able to let ourselves be truly “known” to each other and to others in our program.
One thing about this friend is that she is what I like to call the “spoon” in our group of friends. The spoon is the person who is more or less at the center of the group; the person that everyone else gravitates towards. The spoon brings people together. (Side note: I picked up this whole “spoon” terminology at an earlier point in my life, and I don’t even really know what the original metaphor referred to. So she and I created our own meaning—we decided that the spoon “scoops everyone up”). Without the spoon, the group may have a hard time sustaining itself. If you’ve ever read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, the spoon is a little bit like the Connector, only maybe on a less grand scale. You all know who the spoons are in your peer groups…think about it. It may even be you.
So my friend is moving away. And my peer group is losing its spoon. These facts do not negate the incredible sense of gratefulness and growth that I come away with having known her. But I still hurt. I’m just going to let this hurt for awhile. I’m just going to let it be, and wait for it to heal. This pain is like a sauce that’s got to simmer for a long time, because it’s only time that will reduce it.
I will have much more to say about my friends as the summer wears on—unfortunately, this is not the only loss I will weather this summer. The emotional multitasking will continue. I’ll probably leave the cake in the oven too long, or realize that I don’t have any yeast for the bread, or put in baking soda instead of baking powder in something. Hopefully I don’t get my hair caught in the mixer, but I’m not going to get this just right. I just hope to deal with all of it well enough— well enough that in the end, I’ll have food to sustain me. Well enough that I’m still recognizable….and maybe even a little bit stronger for having lived it. Just well enough.
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