Or, what are you doing to stay sane?

Hey Folks,

Gerontologists tell us that in order to keep our minds sharp we need to pose new challenges, to exercise the areas of our brains that may have been under used over time. Some folks do crossword puzzles, others study music, or foreign languages. For those unfortunates that have suffered physical and mental disability, simple iterative processes such as knitting or basket weaving have traditionally been prescribed as occupational therapy.

Iterative incremental processes like basket weaving, knitting; brick laying are all fundamentally different from woodworking. In the iterative processes each increment has a small influence in defining the final shape. Whereas in woodworking each component is manufactured to a prescribed shape, contributing to the precisely conceived shape of the whole. Very different mental processes are required to achieve the end result.

This week, I decided to try my hand at basket weaving. At first, it was anything but therapeutic. Frustration and failure dogged my first attempts. Fortunately, basket weaving is somewhat akin to knitting, in that, if something doesn’t look right, you can disassemble it and start over. A quality that I was to take advantage of more than once.

Eventually, I learned to look at my emerging project with a different eye, seeing the incremental change with each row and making adjustments in a timely fashion. In this way, basket weaving is a bit like spoon carving. Once I adopted this method, and mindset, progress was much more satisfying and the end product was more easily envisioned.

I think the end result is not unattractive and yet hopefully functional. The basket is supposed to appear, “somewhat pregnant” or “pot bellied”. I may have erred on the side of corpulence but perhaps to my aesthetic that’s more familiar.

Cheers,
Tom