Background summary: Albom’s article is about an African fellow who built a windmill out of junk parts. The interest capturing part of the article is how no one thought he could do it, but the main point of it was to inspire the reader to do the similar – get up and start acting.
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The Lost Art of Building With Your Hands
Albom’s message of leaving the electronic and returning to the hands-on is one that I can wholy agree with. Although I’m the very first one to react against the notion that self sacrifice (hours put into shaking canisters for film) equates to self-productivity (end photo), I can understand the magic of imagination as a fellow who still sits down to building blocks and toy figures every once in a rare while. Constructing a tangible end result is highly rewarding, especially because other people can admire it.
Knowing this, I should have taken polysleep measurements more seriously. Having a solid reading of polysleep’s end effects would have been not only comforting to me, but also something I could point to at the end of the day (if there was one, hurr!). The few tests I conducted (typing, reaction time). If anything, my words per minute (wpm) went up over time, instead of down, but on any given day, it would fluctuate fairly severely in accuracy. It was kind of like the stock market—it seemed to be going up over the long run, but who knew what was going on in the short term?
My imagination has certainly surprised me though, but not in the expected ways. I initially believed the bursts of inspiration came before the experiment, not during the work itself. For example, instead of planning out the business I could do with a successful memory improvement run, I found myself exciting neurons far more often during the actual reading and experimenting. This may be because I often found scheduling solid work much easier to do than scheduling vague “think-time”, but either way, Abolm’s message is something I’ll definitely keep in mind for the last few weeks.
