If you’ve been on the Discord (join the Discord) you know that I’ve been having a bit of a week. Tons of little things have been building up to amount to one big lump of No Fun, and it’s really worn me down.
Like most people I know, I have a healthy dose of anxiety, often manifesting in insomnia. I don’t believe I have any sort of clinical depression, but I certainly get mood crashes and have learned the signs of when they’re happening and how to manage them. Funnily enough, the skills I’ve learned in puppet building have helped with this.
Learning puppet building is like learning any other skill – it amounts to problem solving. Being mentally flexible and having a wide range of experience means that you have more tools in your toolbox to draw from and avoid the “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” issue. All skillsets eventually converge, so that the intellectual gymnastics you perform in one area become useful in all others.
That’s one of the reasons that Operation: Puppet casts such a wide net. For me, there’s not a lot of difference between puppet building, podcast production, game design, Etc. They’re all manifestations and expressions of a creative process; in a way, Operation: Puppet is me creating the continuum that they live in.
The biggest force that opposes learning is mental entropy. Particularly as we age, the trend to follow one’s rails is strong. There is more mass and less energy, so the path of least resistance becomes the default. Having a wide variety of tools in the mental toolbox is one of the things that helps fight back against this. Knowing you have those tools gives you the confidence to fight back.
Result: I took some time and took a breath and solved some problems. Little ones, but inertia works both ways. A brain in motion tends to stay in motion. And things are, by small steps, getting better. And I’m able to do that thanks to the diverse collection of skills I’ve built over the years.
So that’s why puppet building is good for you. Plus puppets are freakin’ cool.
Coffee.