The bootlace

First light on the ridge above the creek, just after six, and my boots are wet to the ankle. The light is only on the tops of the oaks.

A branch goes over somewhere across the valley, and the birds don’t even look up.

Here’s what happened to me. The left boot came loose about a mile back. I felt it go.

I did not stop. That is the whole crime. I did not stop.

Then I stopped. A mile is a long time to think about a bootlace.

So I sat down on the moss at the second bend, and I dug around in the leaf litter with my fingers, like a man who has lost something important.

It’s not important. It’s a bootlace, the flat cotton kind with no metal on the end, and there are about four hundred of those in this cove.

Bo could have told me that in one second. He could have told me in one step, and he’d have been right.

My sock got wet. That is what I got for the effort. I sat in the dew on the moss and my sock got wet, and I gave up.

Then I stood up and walked on and tried to be a man who was not annoyed, which is a long thing to try to be at six in the morning.

And then there was a jingle. That is the sound of his collar.

He came back down off the slope with his nose down, and he went straight past my boot and put the lace on the ground in front of me.

Then he sat. And he looked at me.

I’m not going to describe that look. He is a dog, and he was right, and I’d rather not say that part out loud.

So now I’ve got the lace back, I’ve lost about four minutes, and I’ve got a wet sock.

I’d like the four minutes back more than I’d like the lace.

So here is the question for today.

Why does the smallest annoyance in a morning weigh more than the big thing you actually had to do?

I want to be clear that this is a small question. A ten minute question.

It is the kind that would bother me on a Tuesday. Then it would bother me again on a Sunday.

I’ve never once looked straight at it.

I don’t have an answer. I have one guess. It is a book, and I haven’t read it in a translation I trust.

So let me go and get the book.

Here’s where I am borrowing from. I’m standing outside that whole old tradition and taking one thing out of it, which is the polite way of saying I am borrowing.

The name is Zhuangzi. That’s a name for an old Chinese book, and also for the man some people say wrote it.

Chinese. Fourth century before our era.

Nobody can prove that one man wrote all of it. People have been arguing about that for a very long time, and I’m on a wet ridge.

The book is a whole shelf of arguments. Some of it is serious. Some of it is two men enjoying an afternoon. Not one complaint about the world.

Much of it is about people who cannot get loose, and the answer everyone keeps handing them is to loosen up and accept the situation.

The man I am borrowing from thinks that is too cheap an answer to live on.

Now. The part I want is small.

It is a conversation on a bridge over a river called How-ah. Two men are on the bridge, and the water is running under them.

The book puts it in a chapter called Autumn Floods.

One of them looks down at the fish and says the fish down there are doing fine.

The other one asks how he could know that, since he isn’t a fish himself. That one is his friend. His name is Huizi. The two names end in the same word.

And the man on the bridge will not give him a straight answer. He asks one back, and the question is about where the fish actually are.

I’m not going to say the line. I’m going to say mine.

A fish being happy does not need a witness. It is going on whether or not there is a man on the bridge to check on it.

That’s his whole move. He won’t talk about the inside of something else while standing outside of it. The knowing is not a guess. It is what is there when you happen to be standing in the right place.

Here’s what I take from it. How long a thing is tells you nothing about how much of it there is.

A morning can hold four minutes and be the whole day. A week can be almost nothing at all.

And you cannot tell which is which from up here.

One more thing, because I’m supposed to be honest about where my ideas come from.

Autumn Floods is one of the outer chapters. Scholars generally put those later than the first seven.

The first seven are the inner chapters, and everybody hands those to him. The outer ones are the part other hands got to.

I do not know whose they are. I do not know when they were written.

That chapter is the part of the book I know. So it’s the part I borrow from.

I’m borrowing from the man who asked one back. I’m the one who has to live with that.

Now the price of holding on to it.

If I cannot judge a fish from a bridge, then I cannot judge a morning from a ridge, and that is inconvenient.

Look at somebody’s whole week from up here and call it a bad week, or a lazy one. You were finished in three seconds.

Take that away and I’ve got to go and stand in the middle of the day instead.

I would rather have the three seconds.

Here’s what the morning was actually made of. Coffee gone cold on the stump. A lace. A wet sock.

And Bo, sitting on the one dry rock on this ridge, which was his idea of a good start.

Back to the ridge. The light has come down off the oaks and onto the trail. My sock is still wet.

From up here, looking back down the cove, it is a good morning.

The light is doing what the light does at that hour. It doesn’t know about my four minutes.

Somewhere out there, you stepped over something small this week.

A stair that creaks. A tap in a pipe. A charger that only works at one angle. A thing somebody said in a room that took up no space at all.

And it got more of you than the appointment you made for yourself.

So here’s the shape of it, and I’ve been wrong about shapes before.

The small thing is not heavy because it is heavy. It is heavy because it will hold still long enough for you to put a story on it.

A bootlace is a bootlace. The story I put on mine was that I don’t pack properly, and never will.

And that this is going to be a morning of small mistakes.

And a hurry is the story that does this most often. It shows up first in the smallest thing it can find.

I’ve got two thirds of the answer and a wet sock. I don’t know that it is all of it.

Here’s the thing to try, and it takes one walk out of a door.

On the next walk, count the small things you step over. Gravel. A stick. A bottle cap. The place where the paint has gone off the step.

Say the number out loud when you get back to the door. Not the list. The number, so that somebody could hear you say it. The somebody is allowed to be a dog.

That is the whole assignment. One walk, one number.

Then one more thing, and this is the part that does the work. While you are counting, notice whether you are counting honestly or walking faster so that it is over.

Most of us do the second one. I did it on the way up this morning.

And if one of them is still bothering you when you get back in, don’t fix it in the same hour. Wait until morning and see whether it is still there.

The ones that are still there in the morning are the interesting ones. The ones that went away were never really yours.

You don’t have to do anything about them yet. Just know which ones stayed.

That’s the only trick I’ve got and I don’t know where I picked it up.

It works on the walk to the mailbox. It has nothing to do with ridges. I promise you that.

If you do it twice, the second one is easier, and I’ve no idea why.

If you skip it, you have got ten minutes of a wet man talking to a creek, which is not nothing.

The lace is back. The light is going. I’m going with it.