I had a great time with my brother in law a couple years ago shoveling snow off my parents drive....
So much so we continued into the road and did a houses length in each direction.
was fun (when we were done) watching cars struggle almost all the way up the road until they got to our bit, have a couple seconds of perfect driving experience, before re entering the icy hellscape.
Turns out exercise and purpose is good for kids. Breathing through disappointment is a buddhist technique, a letting go technique. But letting go is only half of mental health. The other half is going after things.
Hell yeah! I did this kind of thing a lot with my kids. Give them a backpack, a flip phone, lunch and drinks and tell them to go explore a hill visible from the house.
I unwittingly terraformed a huge swath of land that started flooding when they flattened out the gravel road to our house over the course of a month or so with a spade when I was 10. This post is weirdly accurate.
I sometimes think of going back there to see what happened since but I'm not sure if someone lives there these days.
I love to dig. My dad used to get mad at me for failing classes in school, which happened often. He'd say, "Do you wanna go dig ditches for a living?!"
Now I'm a software developer and yeah I like it. It shuts my brain off. I wish I could do it part time or even just as an exercise but I live in a suburb and any time you want to dig you have to make a phone call and wait for someone to come out
This, but it's my ADHDAF ass stacking firewood with my dad. Eventually, when I was old enough, I even got to use the splitter and the sledgehammer. Now I'm a grown ass man and Pittsburgh is technically subtropical so he doesn't heat the house with wood anymore, but in years of studying I've never found a more effective meditation than 3 hours of splitting and stacking firewood.