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- Hacker News
- Very nice post. I wish life didn't ruin this for me. As a child, I was forced to pick berries and mushrooms alone when all my friends were playing football - and it made me hate the process with all my heart. But that was so long ago - maybe I should give it one more chance...by suslik
- I also hated picking berries as a child because it was so boring. Nowadays, with so much stress in my life I wouldn't mind spending a day picking berries as it seems pretty relaxing.by denis-stable
- If in the process you realize it still triggers you, maybe lessons from dr. Gabor Maté are useful. He teaches that emotional triggers are valuable teachers because they highlight unresolved past trauma.by wtk
- For me it's sweeping the garden.
I hated having to do this a s a child. When I returned home after being away for quite a while, I picked up just to reduce mom's burden.
Then I found myself actually wanting to do it, just for the mental space it gives. The sense of cleanliness you get adds to the quality of the experience.
by chanux - I find the more and the better I can optimize a routine the more gratification it gives me. Mowing the ideal path through the yard, sweeping the kitchen east to west against the far wall so no crumbs escape under the cabinet and no strokes are duplicated.
Same feeling as well a well optimized hot path.
by the_sleaze_ - My kind of meditation and escapism is going mushroom hunting in the woods. I like the contrasts in life, and realizing that outside the city, life is just getting started. It works like a reset for my brain. Maybe one day I’ll even buy a little place out in the countryside, but for now, my rational side won’t let me do it...by MotoriX
- My family has taken up some hobbies like this, which are very therapeutic to do together. Berry/cherry picking, hiking, mushroom gathering, and on vacation we like to go to certain beaches in Oregon to find agates or other cool rocks, some places have seashells and even a beach in Florida that has shark teeth.
With small kids, these sort of lazy tasks bring out focus, physical awareness and exploration. Living in the city, these are valuable respites from chaos and noise.
by lubujackson - For me its walking.
Life seems a bit better after a long walk preferably somewhere nice
by Havoc - Walking in cities is often doable on 'autopilot' which annoyingly makes room for my overthinking. Walking in the hills is what probably works better for me as the attention needs to be on the pebbles, stones, holes, path forks.by wtk
- Washing dishes, strangely, hits that for me. One of the reasons I've never found dishwashers to be worth it.by maguay
- We just got a dishwasher after forty years without and I’m not sure it was a good idea.
- I find washing dishes by hand meditative too. I also don't find dishwashers too appealing.by tartoran
- I do really appreciate tranquil posts about immersing oneself in actual life, like this one. But as a long-term meditator I have a duty to inform everyone that doing something is not meditation.by summarybot
- But you can meditate while doing something.by Cider9986
- Is meditation so rigidly defined? It would seem to me that a certain kind of activity done with a certain kind of mindset could be deeply meditative. Disclaimer: I am not a meditator.by antonyt
- I never know what to respond to people when talking about meditation and they mention something like running/playing guitar/reading/etc is their meditation. I don't want to diminish their experience or sound like a contrarian but also know that
> doing something is not meditation.
so usually those conversations end with a "hm yes that's nice too"
- I think it is underappreciated how you can make almost anything meditative, even things you previously did not like as mentioned in this article.
For me it's loading and unloading the dishwasher. I hated it, still do, but if I'm careful to approach it with a very delicate kind of focus I can lose myself in the deep mysteries of the task.
by randusername - This really resonates with me. I think I have 2 kinds of meditations like this. 1 is more “centering” - fly fishing; and the other is more “processing” - gravel biking.
When I’m on a long, multi hour gravel bike ride - I usually don’t listen to music - just the sounds of world around me and let my mind freely wander. As my mind wanders it finds the tough emotional pieces I haven’t yet processed and starts chipping away at them. Sometimes I end up crying quite hard depending on what my mind has decided to work through. I’m sure I look like a maniac to whatever farmers I’m passing by.
Fly fishing on the other hand is less emotionally intense and much more calming. The dull roar of the river, the intense focus on the water - trying to spot the fish movements within it, trying to identify the tiny bug life around me so I can better select a fly, the focus on placing my fly and my line precisely where I want it. The rhythmic casting, mending, and recasting. Finding constant balance as you wade across uneven river beds. It’s a rare thing where I can fully silence my mind but it’s easy to do when fly fishing. It’s like a deep reprieve from the otherwise constant chatter of thinking - just calm and serene.
by bikelang - Seattle has wild (foreign, invasive) blackberries all over the place, and in Summer you can easily drive around a bit, spot them, and then spend twenty minutes picking and eating them. As someone from southern California, it's a marvelous thing for food to just be out there in the wild for the taking.by gcanyon
- > for food to just be out there in the wild for the taking
Wait until you hear about hunting!
by artisinal - I lived in Portland for a while and had blackberries along the side of my street. I asked my neighbors about them and they warned me not to eat them because they are basically watered by street runoff.by criddell
- I used to live in the PNW and picking blackberries, mushrooms, cherry plums & oysters kept me quite busy for most of the year. Where I live now the mushrooms and wild berries are nowhere near as abundant, and I feel quite depressed, I’m also spending a lot less time walking (hiking) than I did before. I should probably move back to the PNW for my health.
- I grew up in a valley half an hour south of Seattle that at one point was farmland. It was hard to find anything that didn't like the soil, so of course blackberries loved it. The entire back fence of the half acre or so lot was covered in blackberries that we'd have to hack back every year. As a result, we had some of the biggest best tasting blackberries I've ever had. Unfortunately, I wince every time I see a little tiny thing of blackberries at the farmers market for $7. I know there's economic reasons for it to be this way, but it sucks paying money for something I know grows out of the ground for free somewhere else.by a_t48
- I get it, same reason I enjoy gardening alone in general.
Most of us spend our work time balancing 100 different things, putting out fires, bouncing between meetings, answering adhoc pings via calls/zooms/slacks, and struggling to do the deep work we are allegedly paid for in between.
There's a therapeutic aspect to certain kinds of physical hobby/chore work or full focussed hobbyist time that counterbalances this.
Otherwise at the end of a day of being burned out, we ruminate & doom scroll which only makes things worse.
by steveBK123 - I'm currently on a week-long vacation and it's been so long since I had some proper time off that I forgot how slowly time flows when you're not under pressure.by Tade0
- The missing part in a lot of this is the deliberate silence. Sure, I enjoy catching up with podcasts, but it’s hard to fully settle in and hear your own thoughts if there is other audio on the go.by xattt
- Have much more respect for "yard work" after realizing how therapeutic it is.Hours in the sun doing heavy work after sitting at a desk all week is incredibly relaxing and something i look forward to.by ingvay7
- I do long distance solo road cycling. The riding takes just enough of my cognitive capacity that the rest of my mind wanders lightly, usually not thinking about anything of substance. It feels like meditation to me.by stantaylor
- It’s amazing what 5 minutes spent picking weeds out of my garden does for my mental health.
- About a year and a half ago, I cleared and rough graded my land for our house build. I rented a kx40-4 for about two weeks and put about 140 hours on it. That was pure meditation. The hydraulics became an extension of my body, with the immediate gratification of instantaneous change, I was able to shape the land as I see fit. My wife asked me what I was thinking about and my response was “dirt dirt dirt..rock..dirt” and that was wonderful. I have not had that feeling since I was completely disconnected for a week on an island in Belize. Very calming until the tap root of a big oak tree wrapped around the bedrock 6’ underground. Then you’re reminded that every task has its challenges. I’m now on the look out for a good deal on an excavator.
Otherwise, I enjoy flower farming and grow about 1/2 acre of flowers and sell wholesale. Close second. Sometimes it is stressful in the midst of July/August weeds but then once you come out the other side, it’s all worth it.
by mattwdelong