Two ways of paying attention

Last of the light, and not much of it.

Bo is a few yards ahead of me at a sycamore, with his nose down in the leaf litter, working at something I can’t see. He has been at it a while, and he doesn’t appear to think I’m here.

The light has gone off the ridge behind us and down into the cove, and the water down there’s the last thing still lit.

The oaks have gone the colour of a wet paper bag. The first one that got the light is letting it go again.

There’s a deer somewhere down in that second sycamore. I’m not going to find out which one, and I’d rather have it that way tonight.

One of us has got a track on him and the other one doesn’t, and that’s a difference in the night before it’s a difference in anything.

The temperature has dropped about four degrees in the last ten minutes, and I’ve not noticed it doing that either.

The first part of what happened to me starts further back than the five weeks.

Somewhere in the summer I noticed that I had got good at this trail. Not good at walking it. Good at being on it.

I could tell you what was on the ground before I was level with it. I knew which bend had the wet oak. I knew the good spots for a minute in the rain, and which of them held water after a dry week.

And I was pleased about it. I want that said. It was not a grim thing. It was the best kind of pride, the kind you’ve in a skill.

Then somewhere in the middle of that I noticed the other half of it. I could tell you what was on the ground, and I could not tell you what the light was doing.

Not once, on any morning, had I gone down that trail and come back with the light. Not the hour. The actual colour of it. Whether it came in under the oaks or over the ridge.

That is where we are. Last hour, going.

Here is what happened to me, and it had two parts.

The first part is that I decided I wanted to get better at looking at ordinary things. Not at anything in particular. At the stuff I walk past. A post. A step. Moss on the north side of a stone.

So I made a rule, and I kept it for five weeks. One thing on the way down the trail. One minute of looking at it. Nothing else, and no hunting for anything in it.

And I wrote it on a scrap of paper. The thing first, and then the time.

The thing that happened is that I could not do it, and I did it anyway, five weeks running.

Five weeks. Thirty-five mornings. Not one of them went past about four minutes without my hand going out for the next thing.

Four minutes is the number. That is the best I ever did, and it happened on a fence post with nothing much on it.

I have stopped pretending that number is going to move. I did thirty-five mornings to find out that it does not move, which is a stupid thing to spend five weeks on.

And I still cannot do it. That is worth about four minutes of thinking on its own, and I will come back to it.

What I want to say here is that I didn’t notice it happening, and that’s the whole of the trouble.

A skill you’ve got doesn’t announce itself. It just gets quiet, and you get better. And somewhere in the middle of that the other thing stops happening, and you’ve no date for it.

Nobody stands in a field one morning and says, from today on I’m going to stop seeing the weather.

So here is the question for today.

Why do I have two ways of looking at a thing, and why does one of them arrive already knowing what it wants to find?

And the one underneath it. Which of the two is the one I’m actually using when I think I’m paying attention?

That second question is the real one. I’ve carried it about a fortnight and I’ve not got it anywhere.

I am going to go and get a book first, the way I do.

Here is where I am borrowing from, and I am standing outside that whole old way of thinking while I do it. That is the polite way of saying I am borrowing.

The name is Zhuangzi. It is a name for an old book in Chinese, and for the man who is supposed to have written it.

Fourth century before our era, and Chinese.

Nobody can prove a single man wrote all of it. Scholars have gone at that for years, and I am on a ridge in the dark.

There is a heap of arguments in that book. Most of them are men enjoying an afternoon. Not one is a complaint about the world.

I used to have a reading about this that I no longer hold, and I want to put it down properly, because it was mine and it was wrong.

I used to believe that a person who looked at things properly was paying attention.

And I used to believe the other one, which is that paying attention was a kind of giving up. Letting the country come at you instead of reaching for it.

Those two sound like opposites, and they’re the same idea in different clothes. Both of them had me switching. One day I was the one who looked, and the next day I was the one who let it happen.

I could never be both. And I could never be either for more than a walk.

And the second one is still in me. That’s the reason for this paragraph.

Now, the part I want is small, and it is the smallest piece the whole thing is known for.

He dreamt he was a butterfly.

He woke up. And he could not tell which one of the two it was. Whether he was the man who had dreamt a butterfly, or a butterfly that had dreamt a man.

That is the whole of the story, and I am going to leave it there. That is all I am sure of, and I am not going to reach past it.

I’m not going to tell you what he decided about it either. I don’t know what he decided, and that book has earned better than my guess.

Before I go on, I want to do the thing I do when I borrow, and get it out of the way. I’ve not read that book in a translation I trust. I read pieces of it, years ago, and I’ve read people writing about it.

So when I say what I take from it, I’m saying what has stayed in my head for about a decade. I’m not claiming it’s what the man meant.

There’s a risk in that, and I’d rather name it than be caught by it. A story like that one gets very loose very fast. It’s short, and it’s famous.

Every writer who ever wanted to say something about being awake has picked it up and run with it. Some of the things people have made of that dream wouldn’t fit in a world with a morning in it.

Now I have said the story, and I have said I am not going further with it. Let me be even plainer about what I am not doing.

I am not going to tell you he was wrong.

That is the first thing people do with that story, and I think it is a piece of nonsense. You cannot say he was wrong, because the whole shape of the thing is that he does not know which one to check.

And I am not going to tell you what it proves either, because it does not prove anything about where you are.

What it gives me is a way of naming the difficulty. That is all I have ever wanted out of a book this old.

The difficulty is real and I have it every morning on this trail. You cannot get outside yourself and check.

I want to put one more thing about that dream on the record before I leave it.

The man in it wakes up, and he is in his own bed, and he is still him. That’s the part everybody leaves out when they retell it. Nothing has changed from the outside. Same room. Same morning.

And he is holding a memory of being somewhere else entirely, and the memory isn’t a rumour. It has weather in it, and a body in it.

So he is standing in the correct life, being the correct man, holding a piece of the other one. And there’s no test he can run. He can’t go and check. There’s no second night to try it on.

That’s what I’ve got every morning, minus the butterfly.

And I’ve walked on this ridge a long time without ever once putting that to a test. Because there’s no test. That’s the convenient part, and it’s also why the idea has never done anything for me.

I can’t wake up on the wrong side of a life. I get up in the same cove, same boots, same dog. And everything I thought was the dream turns out to have a job, a shape and a continuation.

Which isn’t proof. It’s just that nothing ever comes and checks.

And I’m aware of how that sounds on a ridge at dusk. It’s not a big claim. It’s the sort of thing you’d say at a table and then never mention again. I’m mentioning it because the whole of this walk is standing on it.

Here is the difference that matters, and I have not said it yet.

On this trail I do not get to choose. I cannot decide to be the empty eye for a minute. I go out, and whichever one turns up turns up, and I have been getting the same one for about twenty years.

And there is no way to go and get the other one off the shelf, because it is not a thing I own.

Here is the part that is not the story. It is what the story leaves you holding.

Here is what I want to say about that dream in my own words. Then I am going to leave it on the ground for a while.

A man has a life. He has gone to sleep in it, and he has got up out of it, and it is still the life. And somewhere in there he was somebody else, and it was not a short bit. It was long enough to have weather in it.

And when he came back he found that he could not find the seam.

That is what will not sit still for me. Not the butterfly. The seam.

Because it means there’s no outside. There’s nowhere to stand and say, that part was the dream and this part is the real one.

He wasn’t asking which of the two was real. He was asking how a man could ever have got from one to the other without noticing the going.

And there is no door in that question. Nothing to argue it out of with. You can’t say, the butterfly was small, and the dreaming was human, therefore here is where we were.

I am not going to say his line. I am going to say mine.

Here is what I take from it.

The eye I was using on that fence post had a list. It knew what it was for. It knew what counts as interesting and what does not. It went out looking for the first, and it let the second go past twenty-two times.

And the other eye, the one that turned up. It does not know what it is for, and because it does not know, it cannot go past anything.

That is all the difference is. One of them is working to a list. The other one has not been given one yet.

That does not sound like much of a discovery until you notice what it does to a morning.

Now here is the price of it, and this is where it stops being pleasant.

If a thing need not be about what you came for, then plenty of what you do out here was never about the creek. It was about the list.

I had a reason to be on this ridge every morning for years. Water. A walk before the day starts. Some thinking done.

And four minutes of a fence post tells me the list was doing more work than I thought.

A dog doesn’t arrive with a list. Bo has never once looked for anything on this trail and come back disappointed.

I want to be careful here, because there’s a soft version of this idea that’s no use to anybody.

The soft version says the empty eye is a state. Something you get quiet into. The kind of thing a man on a ridge says to sound like he has got somewhere.

I do not think that is what the story is about at all. There is nothing in it about peace. The man in it is not calm. He is embarrassed.

He has just woken up, and his first act is to work out which one he is. That is the mood the story is in.

So this is not about arriving somewhere better. It is about the fact that both of the eyes are real, and that he had never thought to ask which one was running.

And I am not going to sit here and tell you the empty one is the good one.

The eye with the list found the water hole three hundred yards back. It is the reason I know where the trail turns. It has kept me out of the creek in the dark twice.

If I take the list away on purpose, I lose those things. The loss is real, and it is not a fair trade for a nicer hour.

Back to the ridge for a minute, because you’ve been walking with an old man talking about eyes.

The light has come off the creek. There’s no colour left in anything above my shoulders, and Bo’s collar is the only bright thing on this trail now.

And I want to put something in front of you that’s not elegant.

Here is the part where I got it wrong.

I did not fail at the fence post. The fence post was fine. The fence post had nothing to do with it. I failed at the rule, and I did not see that for five weeks.

You cannot put the empty eye on a timetable. That is what I was doing. I was going out to look at a post for one minute, and the one minute was a job. I was going out there to do it.

And the moment it is a job, the list comes back. The list is the job. So I was running the experiment with the exact thing I was trying to look at.

I could not have seen it if it had been painted on the post.

Four minutes was not the length of my attention. It was the length of my patience for an errand I had given myself.

That is why the number never moved in five weeks. It was not measuring anything about the world. It was measuring me, and I did not like what it came back with.

And I have a reason for that being the thing that went wrong, and it’s not a small one. I’d rather give it to you than keep it.

The rule did the job too well.

I couldn’t get past about four minutes without my hand going out for something. I didn’t stop being interested. I started being able to do it while looking.

That’s not what the rule was testing, and it’s not nothing, and I’ve been pretending for five weeks that it was nothing.

I got more competent. And competence and this are enemies, and I had no idea until the paper ran out.

So the second eye is not for me on demand. Not at four minutes with a job in my hand.

I have been calling that four minutes a failure, and it is not a failure. It is the only bit of the experiment that turned up something.

I set out to see whether I could look at nothing for a minute. What I found out was that I can look at nothing for about four minutes, and be doing something useful the entire time.

And I have carried that about for about a fortnight now, without knowing what to do with it.

Here is what I am going to do with it. I am going to keep the paper, and I am going to stop counting.

There’s one more thing about that, and it’s the reason I’ve been able to say any of this out loud at all.

Five weeks of writing on a scrap is a strange thing to have in a coat pocket. It’s the most honest object I own.

I’ve read that paper more times than I’ve read any book this year. Four times the number thirty-five on it, and three times nothing.

It has never once said that I did well.

I gave up on the second eye in about the third week, and I didn’t notice I was doing it. Not all at once. Nothing dramatic. I just stopped scheduling it.

Now I think of it as the walking version of doing the washing up. It’s a thing you’ve to remind yourself to do, and the moment you’ve to remind yourself, the thing is over.

There is a way of being reminded that I did try. I will tell you about it, because it is the part I am least proud of.

I kept the scrap for five weeks. I looked at it. I said, that is not four minutes, and I said it as though the number were the problem rather than the job.

And then one morning I did not write anything on the scrap. I did not fill in the gap, and I have not written on it since.

That is five weeks that came to nothing on a piece of paper, and it is the closest thing to an answer I have got.

So that’s the failure. Five weeks, one list, two numbers.

Now I’m going to do the slow half of this, and there are three men in it, and none of them is a mystic.

All three of them were the eye with the list. Deliberately. On purpose. They made themselves better at one kind of looking until it was a whole job.

That’s the piece I had wrong, and it took me most of a season to see it. I had the story on one side and the trained eye on the other, as if they were opposites.

They’re not opposites. One of them is a way of getting into the empty eye, and the other one is what you find out when you get there.

First one is Gilbert White.

Seventeen twenty to seventeen ninety-three. English. He spent almost his whole life in a single village in southern England. He wrote to the people around him about what was going on in it.

The thing I take from him is not a bird and it is not a flower. It is the whole shape of the work.

The whole thing is a record of ordinary hours in ordinary country. It is written by somebody who was not going anywhere, and who was not waiting to be discovered.

I am not going to say his line. I am going to say mine.

A man can be handed a whole new hour and not know it is new. So somebody has to write it down, or it does not get counted.

And the place goes on being the same place with the same nothing in it. That is a slow way to lose an hour.

That is the trained eye doing the first thing it can do. Making an hour count when nothing happened in it.

And the bit I did not expect from him. He was not a different man from the ones who live there, and that is the whole point of the letters.

Now the second one, and you all know this one.

Thoreau.

Eighteen seventeen to eighteen sixty-two. American. He went and lived by a pond in Massachusetts for about two years, and then he wrote a book about it. The book came out in eighteen fifty-four.

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

He went out and looked, on purpose, for years, and then he wrote down what he had seen. The writing is the part people argue about. The looking is the part that built it.

The trained eye isn’t a gift you’re born with or without. It’s a thing you get by looking at the same country long enough that it stops being scenery.

That’s what the pond was for. Not for the book. The book is the receipt.

Here is where I had the whole thing upside down, and it took me the pond to see it.

I thought the empty eye was what happened before training. And it is not. It is what training gives you back, once the list has been worn down by use.

Now the third, and he is the reason I had it wrong for two years.

Muir.

Scottish born. Eighteen thirty-eight to nineteen fourteen. American for the rest of his life.

He wrote about mountains as though they had something on their mind.

I am going to say mine, and I am going to keep it short. I have borrowed this man’s weight for a long time, and I still owe him an honest account of what it did.

Here is the damage. When a man writes like that, a person on a small ridge can start believing that the country is unusually full of meaning.

And that the person is unusually lucky to be on it.

That is a very cheap way to feel important, and it does not survive being examined.

A creek is a creek. The oaks are oaks. There is a lot going on in them, and none of it is about me.

What he gives back is a country worth the trouble of looking at, and that is enough, and it is a small thing to want.

So there are three of them, and they don’t agree about anything. I want to put them together anyway, because they put three different names on the same practice.

Gilbert White stayed in one village and made the hours count.

Thoreau went out for years and made the looking the point.

Muir went further and made the place itself the company.

There’s one thing about all three of them I’ve not said. It’s the thing I’d keep if I could only keep one.

Not one of them wrote about a place they had not been back to.

Every hour in every book of theirs is an hour of standing in the actual weather, with the actual light doing the actual thing.

That is unglamorous, and it is the whole mechanism, and any person with a door and twenty minutes can do it.

The old idea is that attention is a kind of receptivity, and something has to arrive. And some mornings it does.

The plain idea is that attention is a trip to a place you’ve to keep making. The going isn’t a preliminary to the arriving. The going is the thing.

Same walk, same ridge, and the second year of it’s not the first year with more of it added. It’s a different walk.

And I’ve got that for about a mile of this trail and no further, which I’m aware isn’t much of a claim at fifty-five minutes.

Different countries, same three moves. Pick a piece of ground. Go back to it. Look until it stops being the idea of a place and becomes a place.

There is a thing I have never done with any of that, and it is the thing I would recommend. I have never once sat down on this ridge and said out loud what I am looking at. On purpose. With nobody to say it to.

I do it with you, forty times a week, and I had not noticed until this evening that it is the only exercise I have.

That is worth saying, because it sounds like nothing and it appears to be the entire difference. A man who writes about one village for twenty years is not doing it because he is called.

He goes outside and says the hour out loud, badly, to nobody.

And he does it on the days he does not feel like it. And the reward is not insight. It is that the second visit is a different visit, and you did not have to do anything clever to arrange that.

Now. What Bo did, and I am not going to explain it.

He lay down in the leaf litter under that sycamore, in the one place the light is still coming through. He is asleep in it.

He didn’t find it. He didn’t go and look. He fell asleep in the good bit.

That’s the whole of what Bo did.

I have thought about that more than I am going to admit. And I want to be careful here, because a man who spends an hour with a dog can start saying things about dogs.

Bo is not the empty eye. I am not going to give him that job. He is asleep on the one warm patch, it is nearly dark, and there is a bird overhead he has never once cared about. That is a body solving a problem. It is not a way of seeing.

The trained eye and the empty eye are both things we do. They are not something you get to have instead of thinking.

I would like to say so plainly. A soft version of this idea says you can put the thinking down for a while, and that the world will look after you.

It will not. It is perfectly capable of waiting.

Bo will sleep through that fine. He will still be hungry at six.

Now the price of the trained eye.

I have been borrowing all three of these men without paying anything for them, and that is not how this works.

It costs you the things you would have seen instead.

A person who has looked at a wood for forty years has a wood in their head. It is a good wood. It is full of detail and it is theirs.

And they cannot see the wood. They see the wood they built, and everything in it is a thing they were looking for.

That is not wisdom. It is a head full of very accurate old news.

Here is the part that is hard for me to admit, because I did it for about two years and I called it seeing well.

When I first started walking this ridge I’d come back with things. Little ones, and they were good, and I was pleased with how much I was getting.

And every single one of them was a thing I had decided to look for that morning.

Not one of them was a surprise. That was the whole record, and I read it as evidence of a good eye.

I want to be fair to the other side of this. I’ve spent most of the walk on my own side, and it’s the less useful one.

There’s a thing you can do out here that’s not either of my two eyes. It’s the reason I got this whole thing wrong for two years.

It’s what a person does who has to know what is over there. A man who sets traps. A man who has to find his way home at dusk in country he doesn’t know. A woman who knows where the water is in a dry month, what is in season, and what will kill a dog that eats it.

That looking is not a list and it is not peace. It is a trade, learned over years, and the whole point of it is that the answer arrives in time.

I do not have that, and I have never wanted it. I want to be honest that I do not have it, and I would rather have my walk.

But here is the thing I got wrong about it. I thought that trade was a different kind of seeing altogether. As though the trained eye and the field eye could not live in the same person.

There is one more thing about the field eye that I have not said, and it is the least comfortable part of the whole hour.

The trade has a cost too, and it is not a fair thing to hand somebody in a lecture.

If you spend twenty years learning to know what is over there, you get very good at it, and you get to be useful. You also get a place where your attention goes when you are not working, and it is not the same place as your work.

And nobody in that trade tells you about it. It does not fit in the story of the man who is good at the woods.

I have watched two people get very good at their trade in my life, and both of them were a little strange at parties. I am not certain that is the trade. It might be the other way round.

But it is a real cost, and it belongs in the account.

I’ve spent most of this walk praising the man who goes out and looks for a living, and I’d not want that to come out clean.

They can. In fact the only people I know who look properly at ordinary things are people who had to. They went on doing it when they didn’t have to any more.

That’s the part of this I can’t get past, so I’m going to say it plainly.

Nobody gets the empty eye by wanting it. You get it the way you get a callus.

And I am not going to be sentimental about the people who do not get there, because they are not missing something. They are somewhere else doing the other job, and it is a real job, and somebody has to do it.

But the version of this idea that gets sold is the one where you sit down and it arrives, like weather. It did not work like that for me, and I have watched five weeks of my own handwriting proving it.

So if you try this and a gate post stays a gate post, that is not you failing at something. That is the most ordinary possible result of it. It is what mine was.

There is one more thing I have to say about the second half of this walk. It is the part I am least sure anybody wants.

The people in it were all doing the same work. None of them was a mystic, and none of them thought they were on a spiritual errand.

That is what makes them useful to me, and it is why there is no wise man anywhere in this.

If you’ve been listening a while, you will have noticed that I borrow from men who wrote things down a long time ago. I have never once borrowed from anybody who told me what to believe.

That is a choice, and it is not a neutral one. The choice is that I would rather take an idea from somebody who got it from a hedge. Not from somebody who got it from a vision.

So. What is the slow half actually for.

It is for the ordinary practice. Not for the story about the butterfly, and not for the four minutes on my scrap.

And here is where I put the two halves together, and it took me until this evening to do it properly.

It’s not that one eye beats the other. It’s that they’ve swapped places on me without telling me.

For twenty years I was the empty one. I went out with nothing in my head, and I came back full of a light I couldn’t put a word on.

Now I’m the list. I know the good spots, I know the turns, I know what the weather is going to do by the look of a cloud.

And I’ve not had an unremarkable hour on this trail since about halfway through the summer.

That’s not a moral. It’s a record. I didn’t notice it changing, and I couldn’t have told you when.

Here is the only thing I actually know about either kind of eye. Both of them are the result of showing up, and neither of them can be summoned. The one you’ve got is always the one you did not decide.

Back to the ridge, because this has been a while.

The dark has come up the cove from the bottom, and Bo is a shape and not a dog now. His collar went about ten minutes ago.

I’ve been doing the thing all evening without noticing. I only noticed just now, and I’m not going to pretend that isn’t funny.

We’ve been out here fifty-five minutes talking about looking at things.

Right, I am going to stop being the only one talking on this trail for a minute.

Here is the thing about this. I did not do the experiment. I will explain why in a moment.

So I asked instead. I asked people I walked with, over a couple of months, one question.

What do you look at.

Not what do you think about. What do you look at.

And I want to be clear that I did not collect mail for this. I asked people on the trail, and I have forgotten most of what they said, and I will not pretend I heard the rest.

Here is what I have left.

Somebody said moss. Just moss, and then the north side of a thing.

Somebody said the weather, and wouldn’t narrow it past that.

Somebody said their own hands, and then got embarrassed about it and changed the subject to the dog.

And the last of them said nothing at all for a while, and then said, the birds have gone quiet.

That’s a different answer to the one I asked. It’s not what he looks at. It’s what he has stopped hearing.

I’ve been chewing on that one for a month. Because that’s the shape of what happened to me, exactly. I couldn’t have told you it was happening if you had asked me.

Nobody ever notices the day the sound goes.

One person took a while, and then said birds, and then said no, not birds, and then just left it.

Not one of them said trees. That surprised me more than anything else in this walk.

And not one of them said a view, or a sunset, or the creek. Nobody on any walk I have ever been on has pointed at the creek and said, that.

One more, because it is the one I have not been able to use yet.

A man I walk with sometimes puts his hand on my arm when we come round the bend, and does not say anything, and points.

He has never once explained it. I have never once asked. And I have never been anywhere near it myself. I have been the one talking for twenty years.

So of the six of us in this story, I am the only one who has never had it pointed out to him. That is a fact about me, and not about the eye.

Here is the honest reading of that, and there are two, and I can only hold one of them.

Either most of us are looking at small things, or most of us are looking at the thing we already know how to look at.

I have been doing the second one for years, and I would not put it past anybody else.

What I am not going to do is tell you which of those two is true tonight. I do not know, and I have got five weeks of four minutes on a piece of paper as my evidence.

The question I asked has an answer, and it is not the answer I wanted.

I asked why one way of looking arrives already knowing what it wants. Here is what I know.

It arrives knowing because it has been used. The list is not a fault in it. The list is the handle on it.

And it arrived knowing, the whole thirty-five mornings, because I asked it to go to work.

And here is why there is no experiment in this one. I did not do it. I have still got the scrap.

I could not do it because of what I found out about the rule. And if I had set up a week of it, I would have found the same thing again with more paper on it.

So I have taken the job out of it instead. That is all this is.

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

Pick one ordinary thing on the way. Not the creek. Not the light. Something small you’ve walked past more than twice.

Stop with it.

Do not time yourself. Do not look for anything in it. Leave the list at the door, which is the only hard part of this.

Stay until something arrives that you did not go for.

Not a feeling. An actual thing. A patch, an angle, a hole, a smell, an insect. Anything that turns up while you’re standing there with nothing to do.

That’s how you know it happened. You stayed with an ordinary thing, and something you didn’t expect came out of it.

The somebody who could see you is allowed to be a dog. In fact the dog is the only somebody who won’t make it weird.

Now the week version, and this part is optional, and I’ll not come back and ask you about it.

One more instruction, because the week version needs one thing the day version does not.

Take the same walk both times. The same walk. Not a different walk on the week.

That is the whole trick in it, and I did not have it until about the third evening. The third evening is the one that made the rest of the week work.

Anybody can have a good ten minutes somewhere they have never been. That is not the thing to try. That is a nice walk.

The week version is the same two hundred yards four times in one day. By the fifth time something will turn up that the first time was in no position to notice.

And when it does, it will not be dramatic. That is the other thing I wish somebody had told me. Nothing ever arrives. Something is just there in a thing you’ve already been looking at.

A crack in a stone you’ve leaned on four times. A colour on the north side. One bee doing nothing in particular at the height of your shoulder.

That’s the whole of what I’ve got to describe, and I’ve never once seen it and been delighted by it.

Seven days. One thing each day, on the way out, whatever the weather is doing.

Same rule. No timing. Nothing to find.

And one line on a scrap at the end of each walk. Not what you looked at. What turned up that you hadn’t gone for.

Seven days of one line. That’s the whole size of the week version.

Three ways this one goes wrong, so you are not doing it blind.

Most people will pick a good one to start with. A bird. Something already interesting.

That is the old list arriving through the door wearing a different coat. It will not work, and it will feel like it worked, and that is the trap.

Pick the dull one. The gate post you’ve to step around.

Second thing. You will want to tell somebody what turned up.

Do not. Not straight away anyway. Let it be nonsense for a day first, because a thing you said out loud too early gets tidied. I have watched that happen to better sentences than the ones in this walk.

Third thing, and it is the real one. Most days nothing turns up.

Four out of seven, on an ordinary week, you will stand by a gate post for a minute and nothing will happen. The minute will feel long. You will look at the sky. The sky will not do anything for you.

Write nothing on that day. That is not the week version failing. That is the answer for that day.

I know that, because that is what thirty-five mornings on a piece of paper looked like from this end of it.

And if you skip it, you’ve got fifty-five minutes of a man failing to look at a fence post in the dark. That is a better advertisement for the idea than a success would have been.

It works on the way to the mailbox. There’s nothing in it that needs a ridge, and I’m aware that’s a slightly suspicious thing to say about my own life.

Right.

The dark has come up the cove in front of me while we were talking. The creek has gone the colour of the sky, and it’s the last thing you can see.

Bo has got up. He isn’t looking for me, and he isn’t waiting for me. He has decided the walk is a walk, and we’re a part of it.

The scrap is still in my coat. I’ve not folded it up or put it away, and I’m not going to.

I still cannot last four minutes. I have got a better question now.