The One Thing

I grew corn this year.
For the first time in this backyard garden, I grew corn.
As I sat shucking that corn, I thought about my options.
Someone had sent me a link to a video about how I could optimize my time with a microwave oven and careful cob-chopping so that I spent only seconds actually engaged with corn-shucking thereby freeing myself to do multiple other tasks simultaneously.

But something in me languished at the thought of all that. Instead, I took the basket of corn into the back yard, sat in a lawn chair, and started shucking, old-school. With every ear, I considered the scope of this mini-rebellion. For once, I wanted to do just one thing. That's all. One thing.
Shucking corn demands your full physical engagement. Both hands. For the most part, a stationary position helps, too. It also demands light attention--are the silks all cleared off the ear? Are the kernels developed and of good quality?

I thoroughly enjoyed my fifteen minutes of single-purpose work, and that fifteen minutes came back to mind richly as I read the following passage in which Linus Mundy quotes Dee Dee Risher's article in The Other Side:
"One spiritual discipline we must try to recover is to enjoy tasks instead of simply viewing them as things to get done. How many activities are there in our lives in which enjoyment comes from the process of doing them rather than the accomplishment of having them finished? When I pondered this, I discovered that many of the things I enjoyed doing--cooking, gardening, writing letters with a pencil...walking are processes I [now] experience in new ways."

What's one thing you could do today that you can enjoy--not merely for finishing it, but also for simply doing it? What can have your undivided attention in the moment without that ever-present goal of completion intruding?

If you're at all like me, such an approach to the mundane is utterly foreign. It is counter-culture, a deliciously appealing, gleeful rebellion that I can now raise to the status of a spiritual practice.
O happy day!

Linus Mundy, The Complete Guide to Prayer-Walking. (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1996), 18.