Today I spent 2 or 3 minutes trying to balance my umbrella with its tip in the palm of my hand. Because I happened to have an umbrella, and 2 minutes walking to do. It was a surprisingly pleasant endeavour. Purposeless, slightly challenging (my umbrella-balancing skills leave a lot to be desired), and simple. I wonder whether I ought to do more pointless tasks, as there is a purity to the enjoyment derived from them. I would generalise about boys here, and say that boys love setting themselves silly challenges for the hell of it. I would suggest that there's a charming simplicity to some male minds, and the entertainment that they can generate. But that would be me projecting my simple mind onto others, and reading their behaviour in a way that supports my own view of the world. And it would fail to acknowledge that girls share the same grey-matter as boys, and also participate in challenge-for-challenge-sake activities. I have been reading the Historical Illuminatus trilogy on the way to and from work (one of the joys of walking - it allows an extra 10 to 15 minutes reading time each way). I am up to the wilderness diaries of the main character - fragments of thought from a character who has built a log cabin and taken to meditating and being, in isolation. There is much goodness in this section of the trilogy, and I will quote two small parts here: "I am as unimportant to the ants as a man in China is unimportant to me. More: I can imagine the man in China. I doubt that the ants can imagine me." "Today, suddenly, I encountered a quite large brown-ish bear in the woods. I was careful not to do anything threatening (I had my rifle, but did not want to be forced to shoot so noble a beast). Some ancient instinct told me not to run away. I pretended to ignore the huge animal, as if I had more important affairs on my mind. Then I saw out of the corner of my eye that the bear was doing exactly the same pantomime: he was using identical body signals - the same body "language," I might even say - to signify that I was not of any concern to a bear of his royal stature. We moved off, in opposite directions, all the time signaling that we were too busy to be bothered with lesser creatures. I would call this a case of Mask as body language."
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I remember breaking down the wood stacking task into a series of challenges. I was doing it by myself for up to 4 hours and did all kinds of weird things to keep my mind occupied, such as set myself "wodd sectors" and moving pieces of wood according to sequences of numbers.
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