Charles Emerson Winchester was right!

If you watched "M*A*S*H" (the great TV show, not the movie), you will recognize Charles Emerson Winchester as the somewhat effete, self-assured surgeon who came into the mix later in the show. While Hawkeye was, early on, constantly in the business of trying to introduce Winchester to "meatball surgery" - do it fast, do enough to keep the soldiers alive, & start working on someone else - Winchester (in the early days) kept repeating his mantra:

• I do one thing,


• I do it very well,


• Then I move on.

Hawkeye, of course, was the hero of the show, reflecting the reality that a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital needed to engage in triage and speedy, imperfect surgery to keep the greatest number of wounded soldiers alive.

Since most of us are NOT frontline medics, nurses, or surgeons, though - maybe we ought to pay some attention to Winchester.

This thought comes after watching a PBS show about multi-tasking. Several college students were shown in classes texting, emailing, even Twittering for all I know, & complaining that their profs just didn't understand that they were completely capable of handling all this while still receiving & understanding a lecture. (If you are waiting for the part where the old fogey delights in being proved right - here it comes).

As folks in some of the same schools featured in the show begin to do research, it turns out that, to be blunt, it's a load of ... well, something unpleasant. It turns out that the brain is wired in such a way that, technically, it does ONE thing at a time. Since it can SWITCH with great speed, it is possible to have a lot of irons in the fire at one time (picture a young mom with a toddler, a vacuum cleaner, the FedEx guy at the front door, & a draft of a doctoral thesis on her computer screen). The trick is that ALL of those tasks are addressed by a rapid switching between tasks which causes all of them to suffer in terms of performance. In other words, we ALL:

• Do one thing,
• Do it well (if we're concentrating) or poorly,
• Then move on.

Some have described our current lives as being 'a mile wide, and an inch deep'*. Please understand, I love my texting, my email, my Google, and they will will only get my computer away from me when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Still, I think that we need the deeper places & experiences in life - and the world needs what we discover when we turn these phenomenal brains to moving deeper.

If Winchester is not enough of a guide for life, consider that among those Christ called 'blessed' in Matthew 5 were the "pure in heart". This is a call for FOCUS in life, not just for some fastidious avoidance of 'bad things'. It means concentrating - with our minds and therefore with our lives - on something worthy of that attention.

This doesn't mean that we never "play" again - sometimes I want to find out great things online, and sometimes I'm basically watching the lights flicker in a new way [see future post on "Flickering Lights"] - we have to breathe in AND breathe out. This is just a call, a plea, to pay attention - remember what Thoreau said about the 'unexamined life' (& if you don't recognize that - it's GOOGLE time!).


*My first Blog FOOTNOTE: The quote originally came from an old Westerner who, upon dealing with the Powder River for the first time, declared it to be 'a mile wide, an inch deep, too thick to drink, and too thin to plow' - wow, that makes me want to visit (I think I'll head over to Google Earth).