On first glance the phrase “practice makes pleasure” sounds rediculous doesn’t it. But this morning as i walked over my 30,000 piece art mosaic floor i thought to myself, i really do love hunting for all the hidden small areas of nuance, of order, of color-shape matching that are embedded in random but still orderly places.
In terms of healt and mental alertness it came to me that hunting for order within the vast expanse of chaos is actually fun for me. I laughed and called my mind “puzzle brain”. This is in no way implying that i have a great mind for puzzles, firstly there are puzzles, e.g. math puzzles, that i could never in a million years attempt to solve, and secondly in a field of more than 7,000,000,000 people, there are millions and millions more adept at everything… not just puzzle solving, but everything.
So just speaking on a small scale, I deduced that I like solving puzzles in my visual world. This includes hunting for the leaves and flowers i recognize as “weeds” in my garden, what i recognize as cracks and chips in my wall paint, dents in my gutters, patterns in my stone walkway, fun qualities in my wooden floors, and in my mosaic tile floor especially. I like patterns in music, fabric, landscape (trees in clusters) skyscapes — you name it. If i see wall paper or a brick facade then i immediately look for cut-and-paste types of patterns, and depending upon the number of iterations in one visual field i determine how much effort went into making the pattern “solvable” or “unsolvable” and thereby assess “worth” to it.
Next thought was “why do i like to solve visual puzzles” and why is this behavior increasingly pleasurable….. then comes the realization that “practice” is the way we increase the pleasure in all our work. The pleasure coming from my solving a puzzle is directly linked to the number of successfully solved puzzles, no matter how small, reinforcing the behavior (this is supposition, and i would love to ask “Hidden Brain” gurus whether I am correct in this supposition). The supposition is that for me 40 years of looking at and sorting electron microscopic visual information (shapes, associations, repetitions) has been a “practice” which is now so obviously a “pleasure” if maybe that circle…. practice – pleasure – practice – pleasure is not more accurate than the phrase ‘practice makes perfect’.
The repetition, the reinforcement, the refinement of a task must provide satisfaction and stimulation to the pleasure centers of the brain. (JUST MY OPINION)
