"Right now I need to learn with hands, not eyes."
I think one of the reasons I felt it vitally important that I start actually writing code regularly again is the tactile component, combined with the rapid feedback: think, do something with your hands that corresponds to the thinking, then (and here's the really important part) know immediately whether you did it right or not when the machine evaluates it. Not even pen & paper math has that kind of tight pass/fail loop, and I hadn't realized how much I was missing that. Now it feels like a reason to get out of bed in the morning. In general I'm sick to death of learning things I can't immediately apply. It's too easy to get enmeshed in fake problems.