Dear Friends,
How many of you remember your parents or grandparents “tinkering” around the house on their days off?
Often tinkering is just fiddling, puttering around, dabbling with the things you never usually prioritize in your daily routines. In our busy lives how often do we now just “dabble” in a new interest? It seems as if we have become so goal oriented that there is no time to do something that is not productive or goal oriented in some way. Somehow tinkering is seen as wasting our time, but is it?
One member of the SeeingHappy team went snorkeling with an underwater camera, tinkering around the ocean. No National Geographic quality photos but rather these photos are a reflection of a mind quieting experience.
The Atlantic suggests that sometimes we need to spend time with meaningless goals and tinkering because we have forgotten how to play. When everything becomes goal oriented we add stress to our already stressful lives.
“Pointless goals…..are meant to be enjoyed. They trick us into doing the things we love, which can also put us in a flow state, where we’re deeply satisfied, present, and absorbed in the task at hand. If you must justify the time, know that flow states can also boost creativity and serve as an antidote to the constant hijacking of our attention by our work, our devices, and our kids”.
Tinkering is in many ways the act of keeping our hands busy while our minds have time to decompress and reset. We need to reset and quiet our often too busy minds.
So try it – take a little time out to putter around.
The Team at SeeingHappy
