Work with Your Mind, Rest with Your Hands

A little hobby goes a long way

Abraham Joshua Heschel said “If you work with your hands, sabbath with your mind. If you work with your mind, sabbath with your hands.” and it changed my life.

Obviously mental labor and manual labor aren’t a real dichotomy. Nothing in nature is quite that cleanly binary. Nearly every job and task requires both. But there is a particular brand of mental exhaustion that comes from the type of “knowledge worker” work a lot of us do. And a cultural disconnection from getting our hands dirty that’s doing untold damage.

Video calls, presentations, strategy, copywriting, and translating complex ideas into simple, memorable forms are tiring in their own unique ways. Is the work I do more tiring than the construction work I grew up doing in the humid, southern summers with my father? Certainly not physically — I often joke about having “soft computer hands” now — but at the end of my work day, I’m exhausted just the same. And more than being tired, I’m disconnected from myself.

The inescapable brain/body connection

Reading is one of my favorite activities. I love the local library, and every week my Friday morning ritual is to come home with a couple of hefty canvas bags full of books. So you might think when I have downtime on the weekend or at night, I would want to cozy up with a good book...

But the last thing I want to do after a workday full of meetings and complex thought is take in more information. Most days I go out to work in the yard or the garden, put on a toolbelt and pick up any number of in-progress house projects, play guitar, scheme some epic Lego builds with the kids, or sort Magic: the Gathering cards. I want to do something tactile so everything intangible that’s been knocking around in my head all day has a chance to settle.

My parents bought me this plywood top $250 Ibanez acoustic for Christmas the year I turned 18. It’s got some mileage on it, but it’s still kickin’.

I’ve played guitar for longer than I’ve been a designer, and I picked up Magic: the Gathering around 8 years ago, when I couldn’t distinguish my work (hunched over the computer) from my hobbies (hunched over the computer), and neither could my wife. For my brain to work at a high capacity, it needed to rest doing other things.

Now obviously we need our brains to play music, to practice, and learn new things — but it’s not purely a mental activity. There’s something about the hands-on connection. And playing Magic? Magic might be the most complex game in the world. But again, hands on, tactile, and outside myself in community. These hobbies are simultaneously a break from the mental exercise of work and a way to reintegrate my brain and body when they are pulled apart at work.

Nearly everyone I know works with their brains, too.

If you’re reading an email newsletter in your spare time, chances are you’re in the same headspace. If you do a job that requires a lot of mental exercise, but you’re not particularly in touch with working with your hands, I heartily recommend giving it a go this weekend.

Start small. Touch grass. Build a birdhouse. Plant a few flowers. Clean your gutters. Take a Jiu Jitsu class. Just do something, literally anything to get you out of your own head and in touch with your hands. It probably won’t immediately fix everything, but maybe your body will be too tired for your brain to care. :)