The nut, the finger and the closed eyes

A couple of days ago we were moving a piece of furniture to another room. That required that we torque some nuts to disassemble the wardrobe into its constituent parts. While reassembling the wardrobe, after we’ve moved the pieces to their destination, I observed (though it wasn’t the first time) that I lowered my eyelids while fastening the nuts. I did this because I needed to feel the nut and the bolt coming together; I wanted a perfect joint that wouldn’t dismember at the slightest pressure.

Now, I’ve often wondered why we do certain things under certain condition: why do we shut our eyes when ruminating over important matters like thinking through a problem? Why do we close our eyes while singing a heart-touching piece, some even while cycling? Does the heart feel the song more this way? Does our olfactory bulb function better when we smell things with our eyes closed? Is the world more beautiful and entertaining when we momentarily turn off our sense organs? And why did my ex-landlady close her eyes while taking her fruit juice?

Here was my thought: Our sense organs are the doors and windows into our flat(heart), where each sensory information expects to have a room(place) in our relatively small flat. Given that our flat isn’t elastic in its structure and composition, these afferent pieces of information fight among themselves for a place. While some eventually triumph and have a comfortable room, others end up parking by the corridor, and the rest die off.

So, when I was making use of my sense of touch (to feel the nut with the tips of my fingers), I shut my eyes from looking around the room, I shut my ears from listening to any background noise and completely channelled my focus, so my sense of touch would be optimum.

So, there are moments like the one above where the other sense organs may serve as sources of distraction from what we actually want to do, so we tend to use them less.

Inference:

Sometimes, you need to become partially blind or deaf or insensitive or void of taste or perception to concentrate on what really matters. In doing that, your energy is channelled towards that only goal (or those few goals) you want to achieve.

We often spend time and other resources on everything that we hardly accomplish anything; we let open our heart to everything that we end up having no room for important things.