Tool: manual work
Manual work as a means to cool the mind off and reclaim attention.
Attention —or at least the way I experience attention— is a funny phenomenon. It feels as if it were a physical thing, an object that moves in and out of my body.
Whenever my mind goes nuts, engulfed in worry or frenetic thinking, that object that is attention comes up into my head and hides there. It nearly stops interacting with the outside world; with people, objects, surroundings.
To stop it from going around in circles at full speed, I try to project attention outward.
To that effect, doing something that requires interacting physically with the world is often helpful.
A few examples:
- Do the dishes (there are always dishes)
- Remove weeds from my ferns and plants
- Cook
- Do pottery
- Brew beer!
Some of those (brewing beer, notably) take a long time, but others can be brief interventions to reconnnect with the tangible world.
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