Labour intensive - Attention Intensive

Kids are not just labour intensive, they're attention intensive, too, aren't they? They're 'high maintenance' in every way.

You can be fully occupied and working hard, really hard, doing something physical, shovelling dirt, say. That can be back-breaking, literally, you can cripple yourself with it, put your back 'out', as they say, bugger yourself for life. Shovelling dirt. Hard. Crippling. Very labour intensive without a doubt.

But not 'attention intensive'. You can let your mind wander. You can think many thoughts, follow a line of reasoning, mull things over, ponder things, enjoy yourself imagining things, flights of fancy... It is generally easy to pay sufficient attention to the task. Not that it doesn't take some attention, it does, put the dirt here and here, just like this, just like that, turn the spade this way or that way, grip the handle like this, put the feet here and there....

It is a task that requires and develops some skill, requires some coordination of mind and body.

But it leaves plenty of time for freedom of the mind.

In fact it develops freedom. It develops a poetry of motion. A harmony of musculature and skeleton, enjoyed, appreciated by the mind, engaging the emotions and including the lungs, the breathing, the senses of smell and sight and sound, the tactile sensations enjoying the rough, the smooth....

It becomes like a dance. There must be smooth translation of weight from here to there - to interrupt the smooth flow is to make a jarring, to make a sudden unpleasant increase in weight, force, strain.....

One develops a smooth flowing motion that loads the shovel, lifts the weight and moves it through space in a smooth flowing motion, an arc, that pivots over the feet without ever overbalancing the body or extending the limbs too far.

A motion that reaches an end and discharges the load from the shovel as part of the same action and coils back on itself like a rubber band relaxing from tension.

A motion that seeks to repeat itself in smooth cadence, like dancers moving to the music in rythm.

The whole body, including the mind, the emotions, the reason is engaged upon this activity, it is all-inclusive, it catches the whole of one's being in a rythmic dance which is a greater dance than the entertainment activity for this dance includes the external world, interacts with the external world, manipulates, changes the external world, meets, confronts, challenges the world, finds difficulties and the unexpected, smoothly adapts to them and overcomes them or finds a way around them...

Smoothly, with poetry, force and exertion are directed with a maximum of strainless efficiency to effect the manipulation of the inert disordered external world to where you want it to be - changing that into this.

A work which clumsily done would quickly exhaust a person, perhaps in five minutes can be performed for hours, is performed the whole of the day by some, because done in this manner, with beauty, with feeling, with delicacy feeling for the optimum way amongst the multitude of forces, leverages, balances inherent in the human body and load extending out from the hands and arms on that shovel.

It becomes a song, a poem, a dance and yet remains a work, a solid expression of force, power, strength, mass.

It is a complete and all-engrossing thing. Not something nothing. Not a triviality.

And yet it allows in the midst of all that a free happy wandering of the mind. Often it in fact increases the joyous wandering of the mind, perhaps encourages the mind to wander in this direction or that....

But children! No. They demand physical attention and at the same time they demand complete intellectual attention. They take everything. They leave you with nothing.

You cannot tend to a child's physical needs throughout the day and yet let the mind wander and follow its own course. You cannot string together two coherent thoughts many a time.

Again and again there are periods when you do not get two consecutive minutes without a demanding interruption of your thought processes.

They will chatter and bang and make noises even when they require no other attention. It seems to be an inborn device, the young constantly make a noise so's the parent always knows where the young are.

That's from one end. From the other end the child always wants to know where the parent is and, it seems, always wants to know it has the parent's attention. They are attention seekers. We all know that and assume idly that it means the 'look at me' phenomenon where a child displays a new trick or a new toy or something.

No, it means more than that. It means they want your attention 24hours a day for no other reason than to have it. Not to show you this or that but just to have. So's, in effect, you can't have it.

Sit in a room with a child and try to read a book. Everything's fine, the child has no need of you until you try to read that book and then suddenly the child has to pester you minute by minute, frequent interruptions. Or perhaps even a continual never ending pester until you give up.

The child is upset by your attention going elsewhere.

But also the ordinary physical tasks that the child is not perhaps so responsible for in any emotionally or psychologically directed way, just the sheer animal tasks that are required to maintain a child in our culture - dress them, wash them, feed them, attend to their toilet needs.

It is almost impossible to maintain your own inner life - your inner thoughts, your train of thought, your own personal inner dialogue - whilst doing these things.

Because they are not inanimate beings. Of course. Seems obvious, right? But it is more than that. Dogs and cats are not inanimate beings, either, but your can disinterestedly or abstractedly attend to similar needs for them whilst pursuing your own intellectual life. You can groom a horse and contemplate anything you like - holiday plans, romantic kerfuffles, taxation loopholes, academic studies, whatever....

You can't do that with a child.