When Susan had the idea for this blog, it set in motion a physical representation of what I’ve known about her from almost the very beginning. She is deliberate; she likes to take her time with things – whether on a walk, or shopping for native plants, or getting around town w/o a car, or working out in a gym. If I’m not getting 10 things done in a day, I’m disappointed and get depressed. She, on the other hand, regularly makes plans to get one significant thing done in a day, and is more than content when it happens. Somehow the relationship works… we celebrate 26 years of marriage (and 5 being together before that) this November. Love is a strange and wondrous thing!
Coasting has a negative connotation for sure; bosses want to fire workers that do it, teenagers and young people are vilified for doing it, and team athletes who exhibit this tendency do tend to ‘ride the pine‘. We in America live in a type-A dominant culture; the most famous and obvious proof is that in Europe (where our dominant culture derives from), people regularly take 6 weeks off for vacation each year. Who among you readers takes anywhere near that much time here in America? Even teachers, who supposedly ‘get the summer off’ every year, end up filling in most of those weeks with sub-work or other employment to make ends meet.
But I’ve learned over my decades with Susan that Coasting has many positive aspects, especially when examined in relationship to stress, energy output, fitness training (esp. cycling), overall health, spiritual and mental investment and continual learning. What ever happened to ‘speed reading’ for example?
Reading actual hardcopy books is a great example of ‘Coasting’; ‘why not listen to books-on-tape while commuting to be more efficient?’ says my overly-efficient half-brain.
In contrast to ‘coasting’, ‘multi-tasking‘ is a great way to not get anything done right, but imagine oneself getting lots accomplished. My theory is that multi-tasking consists of performing a tight sequence of activities one-at-a-time in rapid succession, so that it appears jobs are co-mingling at the same time. Think of a rapid sequence of images drawn on layers of paper then ‘fluttering’ the pages so it appears as a single moving picture. It’s not; it’s your brain filling in the gaps and creating the familiar experience of continuous motion. How many simultaneous actions can your brain/body actually perform? Even professional drummers will admit though they appear to be multi-tasking complex arrangements with style, they are actually performing coordinated single stick/kick rhythms in quick sequence. When you look at sheet music for any working musician in fact, it betrays the idea of multi-tasking completely. There are detailed instructions on timing and pitch, laid out in a linear sequence over time, for every voice in the music. Why Americans are obsessed with the idea of multi-tasking is a topic for another post, I’m afraid. (*sigh of relief!)
Bottom line; don’t be afraid of coasting. Embrace it, in fact. The elite riders in the Tour deFrance do it, after all… :-} So get your Coast on, go deeper, and win at life.
Team PC
pacificcoasting 