Can You be Present and Work Efficiently? Q&A Eckhart Tolle

Is it really possible somehow to be present and work fast and nevertheless be conscious at the same time? Interesting. Yes. It seems at first that when you are in presence, it almost seems to people that they are forced to do things slowly. And sometimes I'm described as slow by some people close to me. And it's true. But sometimes I can be fast too. There are occasions, There are occasions when I'm quite. When it is demanded, I can be fast. Its presence does not have to be slow. Remember the famous Zen saying, hurry, slowly, hurry, slowly, translated into Spanish, Date prisa lentamente. I think that's a good translation. So what does that mean? How can you go fast and yet be present at the same time? It has a lot to do with the focus of your attention. So you're working here. If a large part of your attention is where you want to get to the result you want to achieve, then you are working here. If you said one can't really put it in numbers or percentages, but I'll do it anyway. So if 80% of your attention is where you need to be, I need to get this finished. And in the meantime it creates a tension in you. There's a mental projection where you need to go. And in the meantime you are doing this in order to get there. If you can be more present and have 80% of your attention, reverse it. Have 80% of your attention in the doing itself and 20% on where you want to get to, because you have to get somewhere, then you can work fast. And working fast with presence implies enjoyment of the activity. And not being present usually implies lack of enjoyment of the activity and the rising of stress, or to be working with distaste or some kind of resistance. And that's not good for anybody. It's not good for you, for your physical body, the people around you. So you can practice with practice, just practice with practical things, or even pretend that you're in a hurry. If you want to have a just a trial practice, pretend that you're in a hurry and you need to get these things. Or maybe you don't even need to pretend because it happens often enough in real life that you're in a hurry, you need to get ready in order to leave the house or go out. And is it possible to do what you have to do within that space of a few minutes or whatever time you need to get ready and do it, actually being fully conscious of every movement and enjoy the energy behind it, which is really getting in touch with your conscious attention. Enjoy the energy that's behind the doing rather than mentally projecting to the future. Do it. And that's hurry slowly is the meaning is that is what that means running the same I if you have to run to catch a plane or a train or a bus or whatever, you can run and be totally centered and yet run fast. So there is a different kind of running. It's a smooth, more smooth, less stressful running. You will actually enjoy every step of it because you're not excessively focused on the next moment. And of course realizing, as the Zen master says, Zen is doing one thing at a time. That's another way of pointing to this way of acting and working then is doing one thing at a time, which means giving your fullest attention to whatever you're doing at this moment. Then you know peripherally of course why you're doing it where you want to go to. But in the meantime you do it and then you're running. And it's not as stressful running anymore. You actually. And if you miss the plane, what does it matter? It's just you're standing somewhere else and you're sitting somewhere else. Not on the plane does it. And you're breathing somewhere. I need to be on that plane. Maybe not. So that's a. It's a practice of hurrying slowly. There's also a tendency in our civilization to create more deadlines than are actually necessary for good functioning of things. I find there are often people create for themselves organizations and so on create unnecessarily tight deadlines that often do not allow things to mature. And so that's a. This has to be done by tomorrow night. Why? And that often they don't even publishers do that sometimes they bring out books. Some books have a slow time to they gradually acquire their readers by word of mouth and so on. And some publishers. Many publishers say if not enough books are sold in the first six months, it's never printed again. There's not even given a chance. There are some TV series that may actually be quite good and they have one run and say not quite enough viewers. But it was so good. Just allow things to mature a little bit. Why the constant deadlines? But you may be trapped in an organization that does that which more likely than not because this world functions so ultimately you may have to create your own organization or. Or if the organization is flexible enough, you may be able to create a different environment. I am famous for not meeting deadlines and the world hasn't collapsed for some reason. But if I were an employee I would have lost my job many times or probably would have walked out unless I could have introduced a different way of doing things. If there's room for that, that's good. It.