Two-handed tapping, a playing technique practiced by nimble-fingered guitarists, is also a counting/balancing exercise used by obsessive/compulsive individuals. I started doing it when I was approximately six or seven years old.
I know that I was at least six or seven, possibly I started a few years before that. Two-handed tapping requires the ability to count to ten, something I could do, forwards and backwards, as far back as I can remember.
Two-handed tapping (there is also two-footed tapping) consists of tapping the fingers of each hand in an ordered pattern, starting with the little finger of one hand and working toward the thumb (1 – 2 – 3 - 4 – 5) and continuing with thumb-to-little-finger counting on the other hand (6 -7 -8 - 9 - 10). The reverse pattern is then tapped, starting with the opposite hand. As I am not dexterous, I always start with the little finger of the left hand, meaning I must do the return pattern starting with the little finger of the right hand. These two countings, one through ten, constitute a set.
But then I must do a reverse set : Right hand, starting with the little finger, 1-2-3-4-5, continuing with the left hand thumb-to-little finger for 6-7-8-9-10, and back again for another ten. There! That’s a balanced set: left to right with a right to left return, then right to left with the reverse return.
The pleasure of accomplishment lasts only seconds. To have everything truly balanced, another forty tappings are needed, right to left starting with the right ten and ending with a left ten, then left-right with a right-left return. Whew! That’s a double balanced set of eighty taps. That should keep all things evil at bay.
The thought “Two hands” is quickly followed by “two hands, two feet”. Toes can be flexed to a count of one through ten. Left to right. Then right to left. Right-left, left-right. Then reverse the whole thing, starting on the right.
By the time the double balanced set of 80 taps is performed with the feet, it would seem that completion looms ahead. But the task is only half finished. It started with two-handed tapping and ended with two-footed tapping. To make everything balance, a 160-tap starting with the feet and ending with the hands is in order.
You get the picture, don’t you? It can go on. After this double-double 160 is achieved, it really demands another double-double starting with the hands but beginning on the right this time. On and on. If one wants to be particularly precise about it, the entire process should be repeated counting backwards. And then . . . on and on and on ad infinitum.
I don’t do this any longer. I outgrew it, or I found other ways to feed my obsessions, or whatever. Or perhaps I have become so obsessed with perfection and the impossibility of its realization that I have turned to procrastination as an avoidance technique. I’ll be counting again one of these days; I fully intend to do so, but not right now.