Sean Carton's Bad Blog

Sunday, April 10, 2005

On the joys of gardening and gaming

There's something to be said about activities that turn your brain off and let you just be. For some reason, digging in the dirt does that to me. It's strange how similar they are when you're in the middle of them, just doing, focused on the task at hand. There's nothing by you and what you're doing, a brief respite that, at the moment, seems to last forever.

A friend of mine once told me that men are capable of thinking about absolutely nothing because of they way their brains are constructed. Today I believed that. Just pure blankness: no time, no "action items," no long term spinning of thoughts that can't be resolved. The joys of gardening and gaming are that they block out everything else and allow Nothing to enter. For a moment at least.

But maybe it's work in general. Not "work" in the intellectual sense that we fool ourselves into thinking we're doing when we're taking up valuable real estate in an office all day. At least for me...I've never been able to lose myself in my "work" until I had something that focued all my attention, that demanded total focus and often involved repetitive tasks that left no room for ambiguity. Perhaps that's what really does it: eliminating ambiguity, the grey spaces that leave us room to think about what we're doing. Gardening and gaming: either you're winning or you're losing, either you're digging or you're standing still. Binary states have an awful lot to offer.

5:27:15 PM