A Case for Resting
It’s sometimes surprising what is and isn’t relaxing.
I was discussing this with God and she reminded me about an old Star Trek episode where Capt. Kirk and the usual suspects beam down to a planet for some rest and relaxation, and end up engaging in some fairly strenuous activities. Spock finds the whole thing confusing, since they are logically not resting at all. It was one of the first times in my life that I encountered the notion that a change is as good as a rest.
She then pointed out that the same thing is at work when we’re struggling with a problem and decide to “sleep on it,” then find when we come back to the problem that the solution is simple and often even fairly obvious. God credits our subconscious minds with finding the solution in these cases; she tells me that our subconscious is perhaps her greatest gift to us, while admitting that it’s also sometimes her worst gift as well, as anyone prone to nightmares can attest.
What brought on the conversation this time was two things that I noticed in my own life.
The first is that I often come home tired after a day at work. Not physically tired, I don’t do that kind of work, but mentally tired. So you’d think the last thing I’d want to do at that point would be anything mentally taxing. Nothing more trying than vegging out to some mindless sit-com. But since I don’t currently have a TV set up, that’s currently not an option. So what I often do is to pull out my iPad and launch a strategy game. After a few minutes I’m engaged and alert, sometimes even to the detriment of being able to get to sleep when it’s time. So by doing something different but still requiring mental effort, I find myself reenergized.
The second thing is sort of the opposite. I’ve begun repackaging my DVDs, taking them out of their cases and putting them into plastic sleeves that take up a lot less room. Going into this, I thought this would be a nice relaxing process. The kind of mindless work that lets me zone out and devote my mind to other things. It turns out that it isn’t that sort of work at all. There’s a fiddly-ness to the process that makes me keep focusing on what I’m doing. The outer cover tends to stick a little to the plastic it’s housed within. The inserts come in various sizes and have to be aligned right to slide into the new sleeves. And the packaging designers have come up with, it seems like, a dozen different variations on the little plastic hub that holds the discs in their cases, requiring me to engage and figure out, do I push this in the middle and wait for it to pop-up, or do I pull on the edge, or do I do both, or is this one of those horrid ones that have to be pulled up from the edge but which don’t have a cut out that lets you actually get hold of the edge?
So it’s not meditative at all.
And God just looks at me and asks why I’m complaining to her. She didn’t design the cases. Well, maybe she didn’t, but if you ask me, she sounded a little defensive when she said it.
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