June 25, 2011

On the Art of Puttering

A moment of calm reflection:

We are a driven people… We keep lists; we crowd our schedules; we look for more efficient ways to organize ourselves.

But every now and then there comes a day for puttering. No one intends to putter. You simply discover, in a brief moment of self-awareness, that you have been puttering…

Your attention is diverted almost immediately and then diverted again. You move through the morning with a calm, oblivious focus, taking on tasks — incidental ones — in the order they present themselves, which is to say no order at all.

Puttering is small-scale, stream-of-consciousness problem-solving.

Excerpted from a New York Times editorial, June 24, 2011.

1 comment:

happy fool said...

What would you think of someone not driven, someone who putters all the time. i loved this, loved loved loved it. maybe i'm an artist ;)