What is it for

Last hour of light, and there is fog sitting in the bottom of the cove, up to about the height of Bo’s shoulders.

The sycamores along the creek let go of their leaves inside one week. It goes like that here.

You look away, and the tree is a different tree.

The ground’s gone cold enough that I can feel it coming up through my boots, and the oak leaves have packed down into a mat that doesn’t slide, which I appreciate more every year.

I’ve been out here most of an hour. Bo’s got exactly as much walk in him as I do, not one minute more, and he’s very precise about it.

So, here’s what happened. It comes in two parts, and, fair warning, I don’t love the second one.

Ten weeks ago I put a sheet of paper in the pocket of this coat. Not a notebook, mind you, just the one sheet, folded twice, and soft as an old rag by the end of the week.

The rule was simple. First thing in the morning, one line: what’s this day for?

And last thing at night, a second line: so what did I actually do with it?

Two lines a day. Nine days on the front of that sheet, and a little over the fold for the back. I did have a reason for all this, and I’ll get to it, I promise, but I wanted the shape of the thing down first.

Part two, then, and this is where I stop enjoying it.

I kept it up nine days, and then I quit, and it took me until this morning, up on this ridge, to work out why.

By about day four, the two lines had gotten a little too friendly with each other.

You know how this goes. Top line says work, I do some work, and the bottom line comes out looking just fine, nice and full. A day well spent.

Now, I want to be careful here, because it’d be easy to make myself sound better than I was.

I wasn’t lying. Nobody was checking. There wasn’t anybody to hand it to.

I was tidying.

And that’s the part I have never said out loud before. Tidying isn’t the same as cheating, it doesn’t feel like cheating, and it does exactly the same work.

Then, on the sixth day, Bo got hold of the sheet.

He didn’t steal it. He picked up one corner, and then he had it, and then he went four steps and lay down on it in the leaves.

He had no opinions whatsoever about my lines. He had opinions about the leaf litter.

So I stood there holding half a sheet and let him have the rest. That’s the whole of his professional advice on the matter.

The reason I started it.

In the spring I read something short and old. It’s been sitting in my head ever since, and I’ll tell you who wrote it shortly.

It made me want the paper thing, and the reason was that it felt like the way to find out something. Whether I was having the life I thought I was having, or just a great many days.

That’s not a small reason. It’s the reason a man buys a boat he can’t afford.

So here is the question for today.

Why do I hand out my best hours and keep the ones I don’t want?

And there’s a second one underneath that, and it’s the worse of the two.

Do I actually know what I would choose twice?

The second one isn’t a trick, and it isn’t for effect. I’ve been carrying both of them since about the middle of the summer.

Here is where I stand on the two of them. I’ve got a real answer to the first one, and it came from a Roman who died a long time ago. He was annoyed about this exact thing before I was born, and he’s better at it than I am.

The second one I don’t have. Not even most of the way, and I’m telling you that now so you can hold me to it in about forty minutes.

Bo is looking at me like I have made this more complicated than it needs to be. That’s his default, and he’s usually right about it. He isn’t going to get this one.

First thing I’ve got to say, because I have leaned on a dead man harder today than in a long time.

This is a borrowing.

I am not part of that world. I don’t live in it and I’m not standing in it. I’m taking one idea out of it and leaving the rest where it lies.

The name is Seneca.

Roman, born around four before our era, in a town called Corduba, which is a real town, in the country we now call Spain.

He died in sixty five of our era, on the order of the emperor. The emperor was Nero, and he had been Nero’s teacher when Nero was a boy. Hold on to that one for a minute, because it matters later.

He was a senator and a lawyer and one of the richest men in Rome, and he wrote a very great deal.

The book I read isn’t any of that. It is a short one, an essay really, a long letter to a friend. It runs about as long as this walk out to the second bend and back. That’s the whole of it.

He wasn’t famous for that book. He’s famous for a handful of long ones that people still argue about.

The short one is the one that’s been sitting in my head since the spring. I am fairly sure I am not the only person it’s done that to.

Here is the situation first, because a name with no situation is just a name.

The world he was writing in counted lives in years. If you died old, you’d done well, and there was a whole way of talking about a person where the number came first.

And underneath all of it, running the whole way through, was the same unasked assumption. There will be a later.

Nobody wrote that down anywhere. Everybody held it. It was the air.

You get through the morning and the interesting part is later. You get through this job and the interesting part is the next thing. You put off the thing you actually want until you’re ready, and you’re going to be ready soon now.

Now, the idea of his I want.

I’m not going to say his lines. I’m going to say mine, and then I’ll tell you how much it cost me to get them out.

His argument starts with a number everybody accepts, which is the number of years a person has. Then he turns the word over.

Years measure how long the container sat on the shelf. They don’t tell you whether anything was in it.

So the shortage, on his reading, isn’t in the supply. It’s in the spending.

And here’s the part I couldn’t put down in the spring.

Time is the one thing that does not go into the pot and come out as something else. Nobody can hand you more of it, and nobody can lend you a day and ask for it back.

And we guard the other thing. We guard the money and we throw the hours away, which is a mad way round, and you wouldn’t do it with a purse.

You wouldn’t have somebody else keep your money for you, and you wouldn’t pay them in promises.

But that is how the hours go. Somebody keeps them, they aren’t there when you get back, and you have paid in something you won’t notice missing until much later.

The first cost is that you lose an excuse.

If the shortage is in the spending, then it isn’t the length of the road, and it isn’t the world’s fault. It’s yours, and it’s yours specifically.

That is worth hearing once.

It isn’t worth hearing every day of your life, and I want to be straight about that.

The second cost is worse, and it’s the one everybody skips over. The fix only works if you have some slack.

If you are working two jobs and you are not sleeping, then this advice is worth nothing. It’s worse than nothing, because now you’ve handed somebody a moral failure on top of no sleep.

I have thought about that a great deal this week. There are people listening to this who don’t have the problem I am describing. They’ve got the other problem, and it’s a much harder one.

Nothing in this applies to them, and I would rather say that out loud. I would rather they didn’t spend an hour of their walk feeling worse about a thing that was never theirs to fix.

Now the third cost, and this is the one I didn’t know was coming.

The man telling everybody to stop letting the hours go does it from inside a life where the hours were going.

In the same short book, in the same breath, he complains about a large house. About people at his door at all hours. About a wife who hasn’t stopped grieving. About what all of it costs.

He says he has almost no time that belongs to him. That is in the book, and the complaint and the advice are two paragraphs apart.

I have never liked a thing more and been annoyed by it more at the same time.

Because he isn’t standing outside the problem talking about it. He’s inside it, at night, writing, annoyed, telling himself the same thing he told everybody else.

And here is the part that has been sitting wrong with me since the spring. The price I actually paid.

If the hours are the shortage, then waste becomes a sin. And a sin means a court, and a court means there’s a man in there keeping score. He never sleeps, and he has a very good memory.

I put that man in my coat pocket with a pencil, and he turned out to be me.

And then I tidied the top of the page so the bottom of the page would look right.

So the first thing I got out of that book didn’t make me honest. It made me tidy.

Back on the ridge, and back to the paper.

It’s still in this coat. The front half of it, folded twice, soft as cloth now.

I’ll tell you what the front half looks like. The nine top lines are perfectly legible, and the lower half is where the edges have gone furry. The pencil has started to be guessable down there.

And I notice which half I keep facing out. I didn’t keep the record. I kept the plan.

That’s a small thing and it’s the whole point, so I’m going to leave it sitting there while I walk.

Now the part I didn’t expect to say.

The pencil is in a drawer. The coat hasn’t been washed. There’s still half a sheet in the pocket, and I haven’t written one line since the ninth day.

I did not decide to stop, and I want that on the record, because it would be a better story if I had. I ran out of paper.

Which is the most boring possible ending, and it’s the true one.

Here are the facts, in order, and I’m not going to dress them up.

One. The experiment wasn’t hard. Writing two lines takes about forty seconds, and I did it for nine days, which is longer than most things I’ve kept up.

Two. I didn’t notice I had stopped for about five weeks.

Three, and this is the one that matters. Writing what a day is for is easy at eight in the morning, when it is still a shape. At eight in the evening it is a bill.

That is the whole difference between those two hours, and I didn’t know it was there until I sat here and looked for it.

Four, and then I’m done. I never once used the sheet to change anything.

Not once in nine days did I look at two lines and go and waste less of the next day. I used it to feel. That was all it did, and it was a very small mirror I kept admiring.

So I’ve given up on the part of that old idea where knowing is supposed to change something. I don’t have one piece of evidence for it, and nine days isn’t a number. It isn’t evidence of anything except that I can hold a pencil.

I’m not saying it’s useless. I’m saying I can’t show you that it works, and I’ve been telling myself for ten weeks that it does.

So. The first question, and the answer I said I had.

Why do I hand out the good hours and keep the ones I don’t want.

The short answer is that I keep believing there will be a later. That is everybody on this ridge, and every house in this county.

There’s a second answer, and it’s the one that actually caught me. The good hours never announce themselves.

The hour you spend on the thing you meant to do doesn’t feel like anything while it’s happening. It just feels like a Thursday.

The hour you spend on the thing you didn’t mean to do feels loud the whole time.

So I’m not choosing between good hours and bad ones. I’m choosing between a quiet thing and a loud thing. Then I go back through the list, add up the quiet ones, and call them nothing.

Now the second question. The one I said I didn’t have.

I’ve got a piece of it now, and it’s a strange piece. I can tell you in three sentences whether a stranger’s Tuesday was well spent. I can do it from the outside, fast, and I am usually right.

I cannot do it for my own.

I’ve looked at the last six weeks twice now, properly, and I get nothing. Not a small answer. No answer at all.

What I can say is narrower than what I wanted. There are hours in those six weeks I would choose again, and I know exactly which ones. They aren’t the ones I would have picked in advance.

And there are days in those six weeks I wouldn’t choose again. I can’t tell you what was wrong with them, because nothing was wrong with them. They were just unremarkable.

That isn’t an answer to the question. I know it isn’t. It’s the first honest thing I’ve got.

Right. I am going to sit down for a minute.

There’s a rock here and it’s dry, which at this hour is a kind of luxury. Bo has already decided about the rock, and he’s on it, and he isn’t asking.

Here is the part of this I actually want you to do.

We’re going to walk for ten minutes together. I’m going to be quiet for most of it, and so can you.

Do not do anything. There is nothing to set up. Here is the one thing, and it is a small thing. Keep walking, and when a plan shows up, do not argue with it. Do not act on it either. Just notice that it showed up, say nothing to it, and keep walking.

That is the whole of it. A plan is not a fact. It is a thing arriving, and you don’t have to hand it anything.

And once, one time only, in the ten minutes, notice a single hour that has already gone today. Don’t name what you ought to have done with it. Just notice that it’s gone, and keep walking.

Ten minutes. If your walk is shorter than that, go out and come back. If you aren’t walking at all, stand still and do it. The noticing is the whole thing, and the boots are optional.

Two things I’ve had to learn the hard way, so you don’t have to find them out on foot.

One. Your attention is going to leave. It leaves at about ninety seconds, and it leaves again around six minutes in. Both times it will feel like the practice has stopped working.

When it goes, don’t go after it, and don’t tell yourself off. Just notice that it had gone, and keep walking. The going after it is the whole reason a walk turns into nothing.

Two. On a walk that short, the interesting thing is almost never one of the plans. It is the thing at the edge that you went past because you were on your way to something else.

There will be one of those. Don’t go back for it. Just let it be the thing you went past.

And if you’d rather not do any of it, put it down. I’m going to talk for another half hour either way.

Here’s what happens to me, since you can’t see it.

About a minute in, the plans start. They’re never big ones. Where to park. What to eat. Which of three things I ought to do first.

I’ve never once been able to stop that coming, and I don’t stop it now. I just watch it go past.

That is where it usually goes quiet, and not because anything has been solved. Because you have stopped arguing with the plans.

Then, if the light is still good and my shoulders have come down, something else turns up. One hour from today, just the one, and it’s gone again, and I don’t get to do anything about it.

That is the practice. Ten minutes. Nothing is wanted from you at the end of it except that you got back.

Bo is off the rock. He’s been watching one sycamore leaf come down for what I would guess is four minutes.

All right. That’s the first half of the walk, and it’s done.

Now the other half, and it goes slower, because this is where I went looking for the fix.

I should tell you where this part came from. I’m about to name two more men, and I don’t want you thinking I spent the summer in a library.

I’ve read the Roman in the spring. I’ve read these next two the way nearly everybody reads a philosopher, which is in pieces, and mostly out of other people’s sentences about them.

I haven’t read either of them end to end. I’m working from the ideas, and I’m saying so.

The fix I went looking for is old, and it isn’t complicated. Decide what the day is for, before it starts, on purpose, and then hold to it.

The Roman has the practical version of it, and it’s exactly what you’d expect from him. Get up. Work out what this day is for. Then do that, and let the rest of it come at you afterward instead of all morning.

That is the old answer to my question. It’s a good answer, and it’s what most of the good advice on this subject stands on top of.

I’m not going to spend a long time on it. There’s a better version of it coming later this season, and it deserves a walk of its own.

I want to be honest about why I stopped at it, though, because this is where it went wrong for me.

I did the deciding part. That is the thing. For nine days I decided what each day was for, in writing, before it started.

And every single morning, after I’d written the line, I felt like a man who’s been put in charge of something. Which isn’t the same as feeling like a man whose day is going somewhere.

Here is what I think the fix actually is, underneath the fix.

Give a day a job and it will do the job. Very well. All day.

I’ve had days that were exactly one thing, a day of nothing but one job. I remember every minute of all of them, and not one of them as a good day.

And the days I would choose twice, out of the six weeks we’ve been talking about, were the ones that got away from me. They had three things on them, and I didn’t choose them. They just happened while I was busy pointed the other way.

So I’ve got a question about the fix now, and it’s the same question with the other face on.

Here is the difficulty. I can’t tell a good day from a bad one, and the days I would choose twice were the ones I didn’t design.

So what exactly is the deciding for?

So I went looking for somebody who had looked at the wanting underneath it.

The first one is German, and he’s a harder walk than the Roman was. The name is Schopenhauer. Born in seventeen eighty-eight in Danzig, which is a real port and is in Poland now. He died in eighteen sixty in Frankfurt, at seventy two.

The book is from eighteen nineteen, and it has been in print ever since. It’s one of those books people keep meaning to get to.

He is a difficult man to be in company with, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. He thought human life was a bad arrangement, and he said so at length. Reading him is like walking up a hill in the dark with somebody who keeps telling you the hill is stupid.

The one idea I want from him is not the bad arrangement. It is the push.

His picture is of a drive in people that has no destination. It isn’t after a thing. It can’t arrive, because there is nothing at the other end of it for it to stop at. It just keeps going, and the going is the whole of it.

And here is the part that made me put the book down and go for a walk.

He says the push never takes a holiday. When it gets satisfied, it doesn’t stop. It goes looking for something else to want.

So a person who has got what they wanted doesn’t get peace. They get a short quiet, and then the push comes back with the next list.

I am not going to say his words. Mine are these.

Every ordinary wanting I have ever had has the same engine under it, and it was not the wanting that was the problem. Not one of them was ever about the thing.

I wanted the walk to be good. I wanted the sheet to tell me something. I wanted to get through the first half of the walk well, and Bo out of the leaves, and the light to hold.

And every single one of those wants had nowhere to finish.

Now what that costs to hold, because it isn’t free and it isn’t comfortable.

If the push is the thing, then wanting less is the only way out. The whole way the word wanting goes, in most people’s lives, is an invitation to want more.

He turns the invitation over and says it’s a trap with a very good smell on it.

That is worth having in your head once.

It’s also a very large dark thing to be carrying up a ridge at the end of a long day. I’m not going to pretend it fits in my coat.

And it has the same fault as the Roman’s version, and worse. It’s a diagnosis with no way out of the room.

The Roman at least gave you something to do on the morning. This one takes the morning away and leaves you on the rock.

So I went looking for the third one, and I found him at the end of the whole thing. The name is Nietzsche. Born in eighteen forty-four in a village called Rocken, which is a real village, and used to be in Prussia. He died in nineteen hundred.

He never had a trade. He taught for a few years and then he stopped, and after that he had no job and no students and very little money.

Here is the thing about him that I think everybody gets wrong the first time. He didn’t go around being miserable. That is not the shape of him.

He wrote in a bright voice. He joked. He wrote to people who didn’t write back, and he went on writing for years.

And the cheerful voice is sitting on top of the worst set of nerves anybody in that century had.

He had headaches that put him on the floor. He lost most of the sight in his left eye when he was in his thirties.

He was in poor health from the time he was a young man until the day he died. He died at fifty five, in nineteen hundred, after a stroke at the start of that year.

I want to be careful with that, because it would be easy to make him into a brave little lesson. He was not brave about it. He was not well.

He wrote about the cheerful thing in the same breath as the headache, and the second one doesn’t show up on the page at all.

Now his one idea, and this is the one that has something to do with my question.

He says the values most people are running their whole lives by were not picked by them. They were handed down. Early. Before you could remember being handed them.

By the time you are grown and claiming the choices are yours, that list has been in your hands for good. It looks like your own handwriting.

So his job, as he set it, is not to get new values. Values are not the problem, and getting new ones is a sort of shopping.

His job is to look at the ones you’ve got and work out which of them you would still hold if nobody were watching.

And he gave the whole job a name, which is a name about taking a thing that has been priced and weighing it again. You will have heard the name. It is usually said about him in a loud voice.

Here is how that lands on a piece of folded paper in a coat.

I could not write the top line. That is all. I am not able to. Not because I didn’t know what a good day was for. Because I never once sat down and looked at the list of things I am actually running on.

I put a habit in a coat pocket and called it a reckoning, and it was not a reckoning at all.

The paper thing was not too small for the question. It was a question about my habits, and the question was about the list underneath them, and I never went near it.

Now what it costs to hold this one, and this is the expensive part of today.

Looking at the list isn’t a neutral activity. People think it is a tidy. It is not.

Look at the list and some of the things turn out to be there for no reason at all. You put a value on a thing because you were handed it. Nobody argued you into it.

It was simply there, the way a fence is there, and one day you notice you have never once given a reason for it. And some of them are there for a reason you would rather not write down. That is the part where people put the book down and go and do the garden.

I am not going to tell you what happens after that, because I don’t know. What I do know is that it didn’t make him happy, and that is not a story about a philosopher.

He ended up alone, with nobody to hand a book to. He had broken off from every person who had been close to him before that.

And he was right about what he was looking at. Those two things were both true at once, and neither one cancelled the other.

Look at the list doesn’t fix you. It makes you lighter, and it makes you lonely. Plenty of people have decided that is a bad trade, and I am not going to argue with them.

And I could stand here and make all of this into the solemn version of itself, and I am not going to. You would switch it off inside a minute, and you would be right to.

So. Three old men, one folded sheet, and no fix.

Here is what I actually think, and I am going to say it once and then leave it alone.

A day is not a job.

I can’t find the purpose of a day at the top of it, because it isn’t up there. The top of the day is where I put the plan, and the plan is a way of not finding out.

A day is for the part of it you already knew you were going to spend. Not the part you decided on. The part you were going to do anyway.

And that part is never in the morning. It is always in the bottom half, and it is the bit that got away from me.

Which means the nine days on that sheet weren’t a failure of method. They were the correct answer to the wrong question, which is a thing that happens to me more often than I would like.

I set out to find out whether I was wasting the day. I found out that I was, and I didn’t write that part down.

There is the ridge. There is the fog in the bottom of the cove. There is a sycamore with about six leaves left on it.

And the light has gone from the trail in about four minutes, and I didn’t feel it go.

There is one thing on this ridge that fits all three of those men, and I haven’t used it yet.

The best hour I get on this trail is not the one I decided on. It is the one about forty minutes before the sun goes, when the light comes through the oaks in strips, and I am usually most of the way to the second bend.

And I have never once planned to be standing there at that hour. Every single time it has happened, I was on my way to something else. I stopped because the ground had gone soft under my boots.

That is the whole finding of this afternoon in about forty words.

It took three dead men and a folded piece of paper to get me to it. That is about the return on three dead men.

Here is the other thing a long walk does, which I have been putting off all afternoon.

On a walk like this one, people tell you the word for their week. It has been happening to me for years. You ask nothing, and they hand it over.

I am not going to tell you who they are. You don’t need a name, and I am not going to give one. I will give you the words.

Exhausted. Full. Waiting.

Long. Then, from somebody who thought about it longer than the rest of us, the good kind of tired.

The porch. The cash. The dog.

And from one person, after some thought, rain.

Two of them gave me two words, which is what happens when the first one is not enough. One gave me a whole thing, and it took a while, and it did not start with them.

Nobody was performing, and I want that said out loud. People are usually braced for that question, and none of these were braced. They were just saying the word they had.

And there is no word in that list for a day that was fine. Not one. There are nine answers here, and not a single one of them is a word for fine.

The best thing anybody gave me all afternoon is a word about the weather.

There is a pattern in that as well, and it isn’t about words. The people who answer me straight are the ones who are walking.

The people who take a day to answer are the ones at a desk. They answer the day after, out of nowhere, with no question asked.

I have never properly understood that, and I am not going to pretend I do tonight.

What I do know is simpler than that. If you want the word for your week, the cheapest way to get it is to go outside and ask your own legs.

I’ve played those back out loud to about five people on this ridge over the years. It took me until about the fourth time before I saw what I am about to say.

Not one of them said the word day.

Every one of those is a word about a container or a substance. Full. Long. Waiting.

Nobody has ever handed me a word that says what the day was for, because nobody is in the habit of knowing that. We’ve got about nine words in common for a week, and not one of them is about what the week was supposed to be.

And that is on us, not on the language.

I will say this once and then I am finished with it. Three old men and none of them agree.

One says stop hoarding. One says the hoarding is the disease. One says look at the list before you decide anything. And none of the three gives you a morning procedure, or gives me a better question than the one I brought up here.

There is no answer sitting in the bottom of this cove. I looked. I’ve got three men’s warnings and a folded piece of paper in a coat, and I’ve also got a dog who has had the best part of the afternoon.

That is the honest total for a fifty minute walk about time, and I’d rather have that than a clean answer. A clean answer wouldn’t get me out of the chair in the morning.

Right. Here is the thing to try, and it is one scrap of paper.

For seven days running, at the door on your way out, write one word at the top. One word for the day.

Not what the day is for. The word you would use for it if you were telling somebody about it afterwards.

Then, at the end of that day, write one line underneath. What the day actually was.

Two lines a day, seven days, one scrap of paper. That is the whole size of it.

Now here is the part that matters, and it’s the part my nine days did not have. Do not change the morning word in the evening.

If you wrote the word long in the morning and the day turned out to be quiet, then it was a long day. You don’t go back up there with a pencil and make it right.

That is the whole repair, and it’s the one thing I learned the expensive way. I am handing it to you in about nine seconds.

The evening line is allowed to embarrass the morning word. That is what it is for.

You keep the scrap. A pen is fine, and paper is better. No app, no subscription, nothing to sign up for, and nothing that asks where you are. Nobody has to know, because there is nothing to report and nowhere to send it.

And when the seven are done, you’ve got seven words and seven lines. You can lay the scrap flat and look at all fourteen things at once. That is how you know it happened. Seven words on one piece of paper.

I am not going to tell you what you will find in it, because I haven’t got seven of my own. I am not going to invent them for you.

Here is what I want to say about it, and it is not a promise. I told you the first half of the walk that knowing does not change anything, and I haven’t found the thing that does.

This is not that thing. What this has is one property my nine days did not have. It can’t be tidied.

The morning word is committed before the day has done anything to you. The evening line has to stand there next to it and take it.

That is all. It is a small repair to a small experiment, and it is the only one I have got.

A few things that will go wrong with it, so you are not doing it blind.

If you miss a day, don’t go back and fill it in. Leave the gap in the paper. The gap is not a failure of the experiment, and it is the only thing in seven days that nobody could have made up.

If a day really was nothing, then the word is nothing, and you write nothing on that line. An empty line isn’t missing information. An empty line is the answer on that day.

And one thing to watch, and this is the last one.

If the evening line is one you would be happy to have read out loud in a room, then you have tidied it again. That is my test, and that is the whole test.

And when you lay the seven out, read them in one direction and then read them the other way. Backwards. I am being serious.

A person can read a scrap forwards and be pleased with it, and read the same scrap backwards and not be. The first look is the flattering one, and that is all the reading trick I’ve got.

Do not add anything to it afterwards. No totals, and no count of the good days, because a count of the good days is a scoreboard, and I have watched what scoreboards do to people.

And if the seven read badly, that is the correct result, and not a reason to do the next seven better. That is the exact place where everybody stops.

One more instruction, because I forgot it and it’s the good one. Do not do this with a person. If there is somebody who would hold you to it, tell them after the seven and not before.

Being watched turns the evening line into a performance, and then you are doing a worse experiment than the one I did, with more pressure on it.

Now, if you don’t want a week, do today. One word in the morning at the door, one line at the end of it, two lines on a scrap. Then the scrap goes in a drawer, or on the fridge, or in the bin.

That is the whole ten minute version. It survives the walk to the mailbox, and it has nothing to do with ridges.

The week is the long version, it is optional, and you can leave it.

If you do want to go further, do the same again the week after with a second scrap. Put the two side by side on the same table.

Two weeks of this will tell you more than either week on its own. By the second one you will have started writing the morning word to be a better word, and that is allowed. Just write down which ones you did that for.

And if you’d rather skip the whole thing, put it down and take the fifty minutes. You’ve got a man complaining about paper on a ridge in the fog, which is its own kind of evening.

Right.

The fog has come up about ten feet while we were talking. Bo has moved to the side of the trail where there is a little more grass, and he is not looking at me.

I have still got half a sheet in this coat, and I am going to leave it in there. I am not washing the coat this week.

I do not know what a day is for.

I know what it feels like.