When my wife was diagnosed with cancer and eventually went into remission, I didn’t really process what was happening at first. I was completely focused on getting her through it. The grief hit me later.

What helped me more than anything was going out into the garden and digging. I made sure to do it safely, since I know it can be risky, so I dug wide and with wooden supports, but there was something about just digging and digging down that let me work through all the darkness that had built up in my head. It gave those feelings somewhere to go.

This is unrelated, but I wonder if I did actually hit on something primal in myself.

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downut 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I figure if Seymore Cray thought digging was useful for mental hygiene it's probably ok:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_tunneling

	▲	shagie 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		https://web.archive.org/web/20080521163217/http://www.time.c... > For Cray, the excavation project is more than a simple diversion. "I work when I'm at home," he recently told a visiting scientist. "I work for three hours, and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go and work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the 4-by-4s. Now, as you can see, I'm up in the Wisconsin woods, and there are elves in the woods. So when they see me leave, they come into my office and solve all the problems I'm having. Then I go back up and work some more." > Rollwagen knows that Cray is only half kidding and that some of the designer's greatest inspirations come when he is digging. Says the chairman: "The real work happens when Seymour is in the tunnel."

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pengaru 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You found your chew toy.

Joking aside, I too have spent many days digging with a shovel and pickaxe on my desert property. There's something to it, even Jim Keller (of DEC, AMD, Tenstorrent...) has discussed digging trenches in some of his podcast interviews.

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devmor 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the “primal urge” to dig is just really seeking the endorphins of manual labor. Digging like that is especially attractive because there’s little planning (unless you’re making a tunnel like the subject here) and no material investment but the earth beneath your feet.

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tasty_freeze 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

One of my sisters had four boys (and no girls) and during summers they would drive her crazy with their boredom. When they were about ages 8-14 one summer she said: go in the back yard and see how big of a hole you can dig.

Wide-eyed they said: really? She said yes, dig as much as you want, but the only rule is it all gets filled in before school starts in the fall. 30 years later they say it was the best summer ever. Every day they were working on it and all of their friends would come by and help dig and plan what development would come next.

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rtkwe 3 hours ago | parent [-]

How deep did they get? Hope she kept an eye on it, unsupported holes quickly get dangerous, people underestimate how much weight is in the soil if the sides give out and just how dangerous that amount of weight moving can be.

	▲	tasty_freeze 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It was more sprawling than deep. It was a series of trenches connecting "rooms". I know they also had "water features" at some points, but the water would soak into the ground pretty quickly then be a mess for a few days, so they didn't do that. No collapses happened and everyone is still alive. :-)

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autoexec 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can get the same endorphins with exercise, but you don't get to see the results of your work. It's so much more satisfying when you can clearly see your progress. Playing in sandboxes or digging holes in your yard is a game, but manual labor alone is often just work.