Spoon Theory and Practice
Simple tasks for mental health in stressful times
Hobbies are Important
My friend Andrew Dacey and I tend to have weirdly overlapping hobbies. I mean, that was part of why we became friends in the first place, but then it built weirdly from there. We both worked IT, we both liked role-playing games, he was a talented photographer and I wanted to get into it. The correlations in hobbies kept coming up. We did 3D modelling for fun at the same time, and recently we both started carving spoons out of wood.
I started before SARS-COV2. It was because of watching a lot of survival shows and noticing that a fair number of the people on them carved spoons as part of their bushcraft. It just seemed relaxing, meditative.
Isolation as Inspiration
As SARS-COV2 started to spread I started to get isolated, I started to spend more of my time alone at home, and that lead to higher levels of stress. After a bunch of time watching terrible YouTube videos, I needed something to do with my hands, something that would allow me to connect with my body.
Carving spoons seemed like a thing to do. I found some harder wood and got out my bush knife (an older buck knife, I would not choose to buy from that company now, but when I got it I…
