my job is mundane, repetitive, and i can perform it on auto-pilot for the most part; it requires very little thought.
at work, half an hour can sometimes seem like a very long time. my hobby, currently computer programming, is full of problems to solve, things to build; it is demanding of various mental faculties. while programming, an hour flies by. at work yesterday, faced with performing the same task over and over again every half a minute or so, for eight hours, i wondered how could i put this time to use more satisfying use? how could i be at once performing the task it is my job to do, while at the same time, be involved in something that i would find useful for when i got home and resumed computer programming? unsurprisingly, yesterday was not the first time i wondered such things, but interestingly (for me at least) i did realize some of the implications. for some reason, i've always imagined that there should be some kind of visual way of thinking which i literally see in my mind, thoughts represented as shapes/forms and colours, and when hearing of people who have photographic memories, or people who see numbers as various coloured shapes, etc, etc, i end up with the impression my mind's eye is blind. so i've often wondered if it is possible to build such a way of thinking, and this was what my previous obsessive hobby (and university degree) - painting - was all about, but of course i never succeeded (in building this, and career wise), but the idea still has allure. so yesterday while wondering how i could make better use of the time spent at work - which is doing almost nothing which interests me - i imagined that another part of me would be immersed in some kind of _productive_ abstract-visual world of thought (ie not just day dreaming). for the first time the obvious problem suddenly occurred to me: how important it is that i can use my eyes to see what i am doing, (((thus the need of my brain to be processing the visual information my eyes receive from the real world))). this suggested a quite substantial split in my consciousness. one part of me, primarily located in the world of matter, my body, would be working, and only the smallest part of my consciousness required to perform the job would be needed here - i suspect not a lot. this would allow the larger part of my consciousness to be focused on the stuff which actually interests me and motivates me into producing. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
