Gaston Bachelard on the Meditative Magic of Housework(brainpickings.org) |
Gaston Bachelard on the Meditative Magic of Housework(brainpickings.org) |
Our ability as humans to take a problem and insert space between it's demands for attention and the furnishing of such attention is one of our most powerful gifts. Housework is a wonderful and perpetually available tool for this.
On the other hand, I have a mathematician friend who's a big proponent of shower brainstorming. We still give him crap for the day when he was working on a proof and took a two hour shower.
"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."
It's like "flip a coin to decide a problem - while it's in the air you'll know how you want it to land".
My college coworker just called it the "coprocessor" and said the only way to engage the coprocessor was copious amounts of mario kart.
I lived in a large new england textile mill building while I was in college, with well over a mile of hallways over its five floors. I could have walked to other states, doing laps at 1AM while figuring out computer science homeworks in the back of my head.