I found the above video fascinating—my father and a friend of his owned an oilfield machine shop when I was very young—and as I watched it occurred to me that I spent my career solving non-physical problems: the problems on which I worked were logical (trying to understand something complicated or to explain well something complicated), psychological (trying to learn or teach various things, in spite of denial, emotional resistance, and/or simple ignorance, in myself or in others), and organizational (shaping and/or working with and within organizations). I very seldom worked on problems involving reshaping or creating physical objects, but instead worked primarily on and through language.
This probably represents an imbalance—at least, it would be easy to convince me that it does. With a do-over, I think I’d spend more consistent time working with the recalcitrance of physical objects—e.g., woodworking, blacksmithing, and the like: creating some physical thing. Gardening would also be a possibility. Although you don’t get a physical object (a desk, a chair, a razor, whatever) as is cooking, now that I think about it, but those creations are fleeting. Still, in cooking one works with insensate objects, which what I’m talking about. Gardening doesn’t produce a simple object, but it does produce a garden, which (in a sense) exists over time, particularly if landscaped with perennials.
If you like the above, you’ll probably enjoy Secrets of the Viking Sword.
UPDATE: Of course, one insensate object one can work on is one’s own body:
Filed under: Daily life, Shaving, Video
