prairie point

I’ve just returned from taking another class at the  school of woodworking. Woodworking is something that I have just recently discovered. Unlike a lot of guys I never took a class in it in junior high school. From my father I learned some basic woodworking skills for home repair projects, mostly with power tools.

This school teaches you to do it all with hand tools. I find that there is something really satisfying about building something strictly with hand tools. It has something to do with the pace of the work and the concentration. It also helps to be away at school in a wonderful setting with no distractions.

The other day at work I was talking to a network guy about why one of our applications was running so slow. He was trying to explain to me that certain applications when they are running a long time start bouncing around the network until they eat up more and more bandwidth doing the same thing. Let me say that I don’t know very much about networking. I only bring this up because what he was telling me reminds me of what is happening inside my head a lot of the time.

I don’t consider my work to be exceptionally complex, but it is abstract and it takes the combined efforts of many people to see a result. On top of that I have to work on numerous projects at once and they are all bouncing around inside my head.

So it was really great to do something with my hands and be able to immediately see the result. But that does not completely explain why it felt so satisfying to me. While I was using the tools and my hands to fashion the wood, I felt like they were also doing something to my brain, rewiring it in a mirror image of the task I was learning. So I feel refreshed because my brain is running more efficiently now. There is a little less noise bouncing around inside.