CPA?

I heard someone speaking about CPA the other day: continuous partial attention. I was half-listening well enough to tune into what he was saying, and I've been thinking about it ever since. In this age of immediate communication, instant gratification, insatiable curiosity and incurable impatience, we are constantly doing several things at once. Articles in the New York Times a few months ago and vignettes in advertising currently on television remind us of the dangers of distracted use of our smart phones. It's not good for our safety, our productivity, or our peace of mind. Yet it is hard for me to discipline myself to just do one thing at a time.

I confess that I got an early start in multitasking. I was constantly in trouble in grade school for rocking in my chair, twiddling my hair, and drawing in the back of my loose leaf while Mrs. Leightner was teaching our lesson. And all of us who are veterans of childrearing found multitasking to be an essential coping skill as we bounced one baby on a hip while preparing a peanut butter sandwich for her brother and cradling the phone beneath our chins.

Still the speaker's point rang true. I know I begin my workday looking at email and taking down phone messages all at the same time. At lunchtime, I eat, read the Huffingtonpost, sort through the snail mail and play a Scrabble on the iPhone. In committee meetings I still draw the folks sitting in front of me. It's hard just to sit still and attack one task at a time.

But I began the week trying it. I resisted peaking at email during the offering at church. Suinday afternoon, with the house so empty and quiet that I could practically hear the blood coursing through my veins, I sat down and painted. No background music, no CNN, no Sunday football (since the Saints weren't playing). Just my art and the quiet. When I finished the painting, alternating between working on it and looking at it from afar to ascertain areas of weakness, I felt as if I had been meditating.

I've tried, with mixed success, to take that work approach into the office with me this week. When I've succeeded, it has been with far greater productivity and intellectual efficiency than I have when I'm trying to do three things at once. And it is with a far greater sense of satisfaction.

I have thought for some time that the compression of time caused by the age of instant accessibility may be asking our brains to evolve more quickly than they are capable of doing. I think I'm going to try to wrestle my brain back into an attitude of more quietude and see what peace and productivity it brings.

What's Changed?

I've just signed a new contract, committing myself to three more years in my wonderful office in the historic Brookwood Exchange Building. As I look forward to continuing to serve families in this welcoming spot, I am also thinking about how the choices available to my clients have changed over the last sixteen years.

Before I began my practice, I returned to college for a graduate degree in counseling and visited a great many traditional boarding schools and schools for students with learning disabilities. Those schools were pretty much all that was available for adolescent students. There were a few emotional growth boarding schools, most of which were pretty in-your-face places. And there were a handful of wilderness programs. Most folks sent their students to boarding or military schools if they were acting out at home, and hoped that they would shape up.

Now there are two separate genres of residential schools for our junior and senior high students. Traditional boarding schools run from the highly competitive equivalent of ivy league colleges to schools which encourage students who are more intellectually limited or who are dispirited and uninspired students. Many institutions now understand learning issues, so in addition to schools exclusively for students with LD, there are now many traditional schools with learning support departments.

But there has also been a proliferation of therapeutic schools for students with emotional and behavioral problems, substance abuse issues, or more than the usual adolescent angst. These schools have evolved to combine medical expertise on anxiety, depression, and a plethora of other disorders; a developmental understanding of the stages of growth a young person experiences on the way to adulthood; and an appreciation of the curative benefits of being outdoors and enjoying exercise. And unlike some earlier models, the new therapeutic schools and programs emphasize a warmth and respect for their young clients.

In my view, the growth of therapeutic programs has helped traditional boarding schools. Traditional boarding schools no longer find themselves with a portion of each class who really doesn't belong there. And young people with more severe emotional problems than typical schools are equipped to handle can get the help they need from the experts at therapeutic schools.

The long term goal at both types of school is the same: to equip a young person to be a capable, well adjusted, productive, happy and - I would hope - moral, young adult. And at both types of schools I continue to be touched and awed at the caring, dedicated faculties and staffs that serve our young people. Their warmth as well as expertise is still, after all these years, the first thing I look for as I continue to visit campuses. And their inspiration is a key ingredient in teaching our children the lessons - both academic and interpersonal - that they will need going forward.