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.
See I can totally understand the excavator story. Would love that too.
Picking currants? I dread that every year. Same with the raspberries and the cherries and ... It's a chore, I really don't like it at all. Especially having to make sure there's no little green stem left on the currants. That work drives me nuts. Only thing worse is puzzles.
I have always dreamed about operating an excavator and learning to do so well. I am not sure if it was a midlife crisis or what but I ended up buying a Chinese 2 ton excavator. I live in the suburbs but when I just want to clear my head I go in the backyard and play around with it. My skills have improved a little but nothing like putting 140 hours on a project good. The one I got was about the same as a U17 but less than half the price.
There are places in (or around) Las Vegas where you can operate heavy equipment in a playground setting. You can dig holes or smash cars or just push dirt around. I'm thinking about spending an afternoon there next time I go.
> completely disconnected for a week on an island in Belize
I used to enjoy 18 hour flights to Asia pre-WiFi for true disconnection, plus time zone difference to US East Coast made the time spent on the ground there feel at least half disconnected
Not really much different than many of our close mammalian relatives, like beavers (rodents and primates are very closely related).
The more interesting thing is the use of "exoskeleton" type tools like excavators , automobiles, or even things like forks. Our brains basically consider them an extension of our body once we learn to use them. Fascinating stuff!
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.
Weeding is the act of removing unwanted plants, known as weeds, from a garden or other area where they are not desired. Capitalism "weeds" out the people that are marked for inefficiency.
I see this mimicking of capitalism as a depressing attempt to be in control. A re-expression of the power dynamic.
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.
For a confident road cyclist it is usually a better experience to be on an actual road than a cycle path even though you have to manage vehicular traffic.
Eh. Not the op, but calm backroads are perfect for such rides. Good enough surface so no need to scan it for the better line as on gravel roads or offroad. Little traffic. And cars are much more predictable than the chaos of bike paths.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah yes, the relaxing, meditative joy of killing things in cold blood. Nothing brings you closer to nature than watching the fur and blood fly. Inner peace coming right up ...
Part of that is right. Hunters, as a group, are closer to nature than most. Thanks to them, all kinds of conservation efforts have been started and maintained.
Ever wonder how Nixon was able to establish the EPA and sign into law the clean air act, the clean water act, the marine mammal protection act, the legacy of parks program, and the endangered species act when the green movement was (and is) mostly associated with left-leaning activists? Hunters. They were a big part of the conservative base and provided cover for Nixon and his conservation efforts.
I don't mean to be a jerk about this, but if you ever find an owl pellet and pull it apart, you'll be able to see the exact number and species of small animals it ate the previous night.
Owls spit out roughly one pellet a day.
Meditating on what this means will bring you closer to nature, although one of the primary benefits of this closeness tends to be gratitude that we can engage with nature on our own terms.
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.
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.
Yes, classically the Point of meditation is to enter into absorption via gathering-poise [not a common term but one I have begun using as of late as a sense-for-sense translation of samadhi]. Unfabricated reality is not accessible through doing things.
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"
There's this very annoying thing where meditation experts try to dumb it down until they're basically describing a state of not thinking about stuff, and then someone else goes "oh cool yeah I don't think about stuff when I run", and the experts immediately go "but not like that!"
I wish that meditation experts would either dumb things down better or not try at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I love picking blackberries, sloes, elderberries, elderflowers, crab apples etc from the hedgerows around me in the south of England. I also love then using them to make preserves etc. Very relaxing and rewarding.
Hm, picking redcurrants usually isn't so much work because you collect entire strigs of berries. It's picking the berries off the strigs later that's more annoying but you can do it while watching tv or something.
I’m sorry, I can’t stand that these types of posts keep making it to the front page of hacker news.
It’s been said over and over but they never reveal the deepest truth. We should all be picking berries all the time but we can’t because capitalism steals our time and wealth and makes us suffer.
I mean, can you deny that’s what he’s saying here? “I find it more pleasurable picking berries than writing code or working in a coffee shop or yada yada yada?”
I have done both throughout my life. I can assure you very few engineers would prefer to be out in a field in the sun or rain working 16 hour days in harvest season to get the berries in before they rot.
And that goes as much for wild berry picking for sustenance, sustenance farming, homesteading, or commercial farming.
I love my little garden. It’s zen for me to be out there trimming, doing soil amendments, picking fruit, etc. I also worked on my parents 2 acre garden that sustained the household (and later sold at market). I highly prefer my easy white collar job to that.
So yeah, I do deny what he’s saying there. I enjoyed programming for fun way more than gardening for survival. Just like I enjoy gardening for fun way more than engineering for survival. The latter scenario is preferable to the former for the vast majority of people.
I don't think that he wants to pick berries all the time. Or be without his family all the time (even though he prefers being on his own with the berries).
I envy the guy. I wouldn't want to pick berries all the time. But having a routine source of release and tuning out like that which happens to commune with nature and use one's hands...
I was building workbenches for my students last week. A lot of the time was spent outside breaking down pallets and staging things. It was too hot, but I saw the trees sway, the few puffy clouds move, the lizards dart through my path, the squirrels squabble. The few times the wind suddenly picked up felt like heaven. My body ached in new ways. My fingers got into a rhythm and I watched them do things.
I could easily get a job doing work like that. No! I want to be with my students, and I want to work on my hard cerebral projects. But there is a joy to being in nature and to do things with your hands, and there is a rhythm to doing time consuming work, and when we make time for it, it feels really good in a primal way.
I think a reminder to periodically log out and go engage in some repetitive task and actually find peace and enjoyment in it is probably a good thing for a lot of folks.
He says he finds it more pleasurable, not that we should be doing it all the time. And he definitely doesn't say anything about capitalism. There are lots of things that are pleasurable but we can't do all the time, and there are lots of things we need to do but aren't pleasurable. Both exist.
If you're looking for a place to find things to pick: https://fallingfruit.org/about/welcome
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.
> “dirt dirt dirt..rock..dirt” and that was wonderful
reminds me of discovering minecraft for the first time a long time ago
See I can totally understand the excavator story. Would love that too.
Picking currants? I dread that every year. Same with the raspberries and the cherries and ... It's a chore, I really don't like it at all. Especially having to make sure there's no little green stem left on the currants. That work drives me nuts. Only thing worse is puzzles.
[delayed]
I have always dreamed about operating an excavator and learning to do so well. I am not sure if it was a midlife crisis or what but I ended up buying a Chinese 2 ton excavator. I live in the suburbs but when I just want to clear my head I go in the backyard and play around with it. My skills have improved a little but nothing like putting 140 hours on a project good. The one I got was about the same as a U17 but less than half the price.
There are places in (or around) Las Vegas where you can operate heavy equipment in a playground setting. You can dig holes or smash cars or just push dirt around. I'm thinking about spending an afternoon there next time I go.
So the TikTok memes about an "emotional support excavator" are real!
> completely disconnected for a week on an island in Belize
I used to enjoy 18 hour flights to Asia pre-WiFi for true disconnection, plus time zone difference to US East Coast made the time spent on the ground there feel at least half disconnected
I just go for a walk in the woods.
I believe ability to shape our immediate surrounding is deeply placed in our brains.
Not really much different than many of our close mammalian relatives, like beavers (rodents and primates are very closely related).
The more interesting thing is the use of "exoskeleton" type tools like excavators , automobiles, or even things like forks. Our brains basically consider them an extension of our body once we learn to use them. Fascinating stuff!
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.
[delayed]
It’s amazing what 5 minutes spent picking weeds out of my garden does for my mental health.
You know what, that’s pretty depressing.
Why?
Weeding is the act of removing unwanted plants, known as weeds, from a garden or other area where they are not desired. Capitalism "weeds" out the people that are marked for inefficiency.
I see this mimicking of capitalism as a depressing attempt to be in control. A re-expression of the power dynamic.
This is just my opinion.
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.
Yes, if you’re on a car free path, even better!
For a confident road cyclist it is usually a better experience to be on an actual road than a cycle path even though you have to manage vehicular traffic.
Eh. Not the op, but calm backroads are perfect for such rides. Good enough surface so no need to scan it for the better line as on gravel roads or offroad. Little traffic. And cars are much more predictable than the chaos of bike paths.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> for food to just be out there in the wild for the taking
Wait until you hear about hunting!
Yuck ....
Way to ruin something good .
Don't be an ass.
Not everyone shares your opinion that what needs to be done for you to eat meat, is fine only so long as you can pay someone else to do it for you.
This post engages with bad faith and violates the hacker news rules.
You seem pretty disconnected from nature.
Ah yes, the relaxing, meditative joy of killing things in cold blood. Nothing brings you closer to nature than watching the fur and blood fly. Inner peace coming right up ...
You have just insulted generations of Matagi.
Part of that is right. Hunters, as a group, are closer to nature than most. Thanks to them, all kinds of conservation efforts have been started and maintained.
Ever wonder how Nixon was able to establish the EPA and sign into law the clean air act, the clean water act, the marine mammal protection act, the legacy of parks program, and the endangered species act when the green movement was (and is) mostly associated with left-leaning activists? Hunters. They were a big part of the conservative base and provided cover for Nixon and his conservation efforts.
I don't mean to be a jerk about this, but if you ever find an owl pellet and pull it apart, you'll be able to see the exact number and species of small animals it ate the previous night.
Owls spit out roughly one pellet a day.
Meditating on what this means will bring you closer to nature, although one of the primary benefits of this closeness tends to be gratitude that we can engage with nature on our own terms.
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.
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.
Yes, classically the Point of meditation is to enter into absorption via gathering-poise [not a common term but one I have begun using as of late as a sense-for-sense translation of samadhi]. Unfabricated reality is not accessible through doing things.
But you can meditate while doing something.
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"
There's this very annoying thing where meditation experts try to dumb it down until they're basically describing a state of not thinking about stuff, and then someone else goes "oh cool yeah I don't think about stuff when I run", and the experts immediately go "but not like that!"
I wish that meditation experts would either dumb things down better or not try at all.
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.
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.
Washing dishes, strangely, hits that for me. One of the reasons I've never found dishwashers to be worth it.
I find washing dishes by hand meditative too. I also don't find dishwashers too appealing.
We just got a dishwasher after forty years without and I’m not sure it was a good idea.
For me its walking.
Life seems a bit better after a long walk preferably somewhere nice
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Sometimes when I push my finger on an old scar, it hurts. I don't expect it to get much better.
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.
I love picking blackberries, sloes, elderberries, elderflowers, crab apples etc from the hedgerows around me in the south of England. I also love then using them to make preserves etc. Very relaxing and rewarding.
Polishing my shoes is mine
Shelling peas has a similar quality
Hm, picking redcurrants usually isn't so much work because you collect entire strigs of berries. It's picking the berries off the strigs later that's more annoying but you can do it while watching tv or something.
LOve it
I’m sorry, I can’t stand that these types of posts keep making it to the front page of hacker news.
It’s been said over and over but they never reveal the deepest truth. We should all be picking berries all the time but we can’t because capitalism steals our time and wealth and makes us suffer.
I mean, can you deny that’s what he’s saying here? “I find it more pleasurable picking berries than writing code or working in a coffee shop or yada yada yada?”
Being able to pick berries is fun and relaxing!
Having to pick berries is not.
I have done both throughout my life. I can assure you very few engineers would prefer to be out in a field in the sun or rain working 16 hour days in harvest season to get the berries in before they rot.
And that goes as much for wild berry picking for sustenance, sustenance farming, homesteading, or commercial farming.
I love my little garden. It’s zen for me to be out there trimming, doing soil amendments, picking fruit, etc. I also worked on my parents 2 acre garden that sustained the household (and later sold at market). I highly prefer my easy white collar job to that.
So yeah, I do deny what he’s saying there. I enjoyed programming for fun way more than gardening for survival. Just like I enjoy gardening for fun way more than engineering for survival. The latter scenario is preferable to the former for the vast majority of people.
> We should all be picking berries all the time
I don't think that he wants to pick berries all the time. Or be without his family all the time (even though he prefers being on his own with the berries).
I envy the guy. I wouldn't want to pick berries all the time. But having a routine source of release and tuning out like that which happens to commune with nature and use one's hands...
I was building workbenches for my students last week. A lot of the time was spent outside breaking down pallets and staging things. It was too hot, but I saw the trees sway, the few puffy clouds move, the lizards dart through my path, the squirrels squabble. The few times the wind suddenly picked up felt like heaven. My body ached in new ways. My fingers got into a rhythm and I watched them do things.
I could easily get a job doing work like that. No! I want to be with my students, and I want to work on my hard cerebral projects. But there is a joy to being in nature and to do things with your hands, and there is a rhythm to doing time consuming work, and when we make time for it, it feels really good in a primal way.
I think a reminder to periodically log out and go engage in some repetitive task and actually find peace and enjoyment in it is probably a good thing for a lot of folks.
He says he finds it more pleasurable, not that we should be doing it all the time. And he definitely doesn't say anything about capitalism. There are lots of things that are pleasurable but we can't do all the time, and there are lots of things we need to do but aren't pleasurable. Both exist.
Every day there’s another lucky 10k.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
That post was by a salesman selling what he sells. He’s not looking to learn something new or teach something new, he’s looking for new clients.