Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Sports, handicrafts and physical work

Thinking is very much like doing handicrafts: you examine things and try to build something from them with some goals in mind and a some kind of picture of the enviornment that you are in.

So doing handicrafts, doing physical labor and enjoying sports gives you concretical experience of the possible abstract situations that you meet in your work and of how to cope with each of them skillfully.

The easiest example is our concept of space: by touching and feeling we conceive the shapes and places of objects. This comes to a more abstract level but works very much the same when we think of what are the places of the things in our memory: how we conviently find them, handle them and rearrange the memory neatly. That is often like extending your hand to the memory place, bladdring through some things there, finding the right one, taking it closer for inspection, possibly making some changes to it and then placing it back again to where it belongs.

Likeiwse, if you meet some obstacle in your work, meeting it wisely is very much the same as if you would meet a physical obstacle when exercising yourself physically, like on a walk in a forest (link): you take a look at it and try to climb over. These analogies are in our nature, so that our concretical experience with physical objects teaches us wisdom of life taht is useful whatever do, so also in our work. And since the most repeated actions, the main guidelines of your work, cumulate the most, it matters a lot for your work which amount of wisdom of life you have. The easiest and most natural way to increase your wisdom of life is to have a demanding but absolutely enjoyable sports hobby...

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