Two words

Last hour of light. Wind up the draw, and mud in the low place just deep enough to make every step a small decision.

Bo is ahead of me, and he has not looked back in ten minutes, which is not usual for him.

Now the thing that happened. I got asked how my week had been.

I’m not going to say who asked. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is what came out of my mouth. It was a sentence, it was the right length, and there was nothing in it.

And the awful part is that the nothing in it sounded like a man who had his week under control.

Then I got in the car and tried the same thing on myself, out loud, alone. Four tries. All four of them were about the weather.

There’s nothing wrong with the weather. It’s been a genuinely remarkable week for mud. It’s just that the sentence about the weather was already finished, and it was sitting there, ready to go.

And whatever the week actually was hadn’t been finished at all. It was still going.

A finished sentence is worth something. You hand one of those to anybody and they nod and move on, and I’ve been living on them all week.

So I brought a scrap of paper up here with a plan. I was going to write one word for my week at the top of the ridge and say it out loud.

Here’s how the plan went. I got to the top, I wrote the word, and I looked at it for a while, the way you look at a thing you’ve just committed to. Then the wind took the paper off the stump.

I want to be fair to myself. I could’ve written a second one. I had a pencil in the other pocket, and a flat rock on that stump that would have held it down.

I did not. I watched it go.

I got about two steps after it. Then I stopped and looked at the ground.

It is in a sycamore about four feet up, in the leaves. In this wind it isn’t coming down, and I’ve been standing here about two minutes and the word is still up in it.

And here’s the part I keep turning over. I know exactly what the word was. I wrote it, and I read it before it went.

I cannot get at it.

That’s the whole failure and I’m reporting it straight. I’ve lost a sheet of paper, and I’ve got nothing to say about my week.

So here is the question for today.

Why is it harder to say what is going on inside than it is to say what the weather is doing?

I don’t have a clean answer. I’ve got a piece of one, and it came from a man who had been dead a long while by then.

The usual thing at this point in the walk is for me to go and get a book. This one is not a book, exactly. It is a man who gave talks on tape for a living.

I am standing outside that whole old world, and I am taking one idea out of it. I do not live in it.

The name is Alan Watts.

English. Born nineteen fifteen. Died nineteen seventy-three.

He spent most of the middle of his life in America, and he wasn’t always comfortable there.

Before that he trained to be an engineer, and sold fishing tackle on the Isle of Wight for a living. I like that more about him than any of the rest.

Then he went west, not east. He moved to America in nineteen thirty-eight, and he did not get to Japan until much later, in the sixties.

And here is the part that matters. He read most of those old books in English, in translations made by other men. He studied the Chinese writing too, with a brush, but he never claimed to be a scholar of it.

He settled in San Francisco in the early fifties, and taught at a school there for the study of Asian thought. He ran it for a while.

Now the one idea, and I’m going to say mine, not his.

Here’s his situation. He’d spent years reading books that pointed at something real, and arriving at English that pointed off to one side.

And he didn’t think that was the translators being careless. They were doing their best with the wrong tool.

The old words were cut for the world outside your skin. A stone is a stone, and a house is a house. You can point at those and everybody points at the same one.

Then you carry that tool inside, and use it on a thing that has no edges at all. Inside isn’t made of separate pieces.

It comes in one piece, and by the time you’ve looked at it, it has already changed into something else.

And the tool cuts. That’s what a word does. It chops a moving thing into standing bits so you can hold one up and look at it.

That isn’t a criticism of words. You can’t have a language without doing it, and every word in here is a small pair of scissors.

Here’s where the difficulty comes from, and this is the bit I take. The moment you name it, you’ve also made it a thing.

A thing has an edge. A thing can be counted, and put down, and put away again.

Now the cost, because it has one and it isn’t small.

A feeling with no name in it is a bad thing to carry around. It’s like a box with nothing written on the side.

So the word isn’t the enemy here. The word is the handle.

And the trouble with a handle is that you can hang on to it forever. You can go round the whole day with it in your fist and never notice what it was cut out of.

That’s my own bad habit, not his, and I’d rather say it now than blame a dead man for it.

You would think the hard part is finding the word. It isn’t. The hard part is that the search for the word is a way of not having to look at the thing.

So the answer to my question is only half an answer, and I said it would be. Naming it is hard because it won’t hold still. Not because we’re short of words.

Back on the ridge now. It’s started to spit, and Bo has gone four feet ahead and is standing in it on purpose.

I went back down to the stump and did the thing I said I wouldn’t do, which is read the tree. The word I had written is still up in the leaves.

And I can tell you now what it was, and it was the weather again. I did the whole thing and put a weather word on a scrap of paper.

I have never been good at this. And you have done the same. Somebody asked you how you were this week, and something in your head moved two inches and came out in the wrong shape.

Here’s what I’m going to ask you for, and it’s one thing. Not two, despite the name of this walk.

Your week. One word. Not a sentence, and not a story. The one word you’ve been carrying about in your pocket all week without knowing it was there.

Nobody has sent me one yet. This is the first time I’m asking. So this week I kept my ears open instead, and wrote down four words I heard people use about their week.

At the feed store, on the phone, at the trailhead. I’m going to read them, and not make a show of any of them.

One was waiting.

One was long.

One was housework, spelled out in full, which I appreciated more than I can say.

And one was a word I am not going to read out, because I don’t know how to pronounce it.

I looked at those four words for a while, and I want to report what I found. It isn’t what I expected.

Not one of them told me how the week felt. They told me what was happening during the week.

Waiting is a thing that happens to you. Long is a length. Housework is a job on a list.

And here’s the part I didn’t see coming. Once I had the four words I wasn’t curious about my week any more. I was sorting them.

I put them in order. Long went to the bottom, waiting went up, and I was ten minutes into a whole evening of having feelings about a Monday.

The words were a shelf. I used them as a shelf, put the week up there, and never touched the week.

So I’m going to try the two words a different way. Two words. Not one.

Because one word is one handle, and I’ve been holding them all morning.

The two words are got out and put down. That’s all. The first one is what happened, and the second one is what it was like.

You can say them in the wrong order. You can change the second one halfway through, because that isn’t a failure. That’s what it’s doing.

I did mine at the stump where I lost the paper, and I got the first one out fine.

The second one took me about half a mile. It wasn’t tidy. One word, then two more, then the first one again. By the end I’d used about nine words for what I’d been calling one thing all week.

I’m not saying that’s progress. It may be a Saturday. You should take my nine with about four grains of salt.

Here’s the thing to try. One walk, about nine words.

On the walk, say your two out loud. First one: what happened, just the thing, a half sentence if it needs to be.

Second one: what it was like. Not the word for it. The actual ordinary word you’d use telling a friend on the porch.

Out loud. Said, not written. A whisper counts, and so does saying it into a dog’s collar.

That’s the whole assignment. One walk, two sentences out loud, nobody listening.

If the second one turns into a handle, you’ll hear it happen. That’s how you know it wasn’t real. A real one sounds like something you would only say to one person.

Nobody has to know, and there’s nothing to send it to.

For the long version, do it seven days running and keep the fourteen words on a scrap. One day per word, so you can see whether the second one is a different animal each time, or the same one in different coats.

No app for it, and no putting it off until you feel like starting.

And leave it if you’d rather. You still get a man under a sycamore, explaining why he can’t say one word out loud.

Last thing before the close, and it’s all Bo has done in twelve minutes.

He’s found a hole. He’s in it. He’s entirely satisfied, and he doesn’t appear to be looking for a word for it.

The word is still in the tree. The rain’s probably got it by now.