A word you keep saying

The wind has been coming down this ridge all afternoon, and it just caught up with me.

Last of the light. I’m up on the top end, past the sycamores, with scrub ahead and sky behind.

About halfway up I made a rule. I said it out loud so it would count, and the rule was that I’m not saying the word should again today.

I felt good about that. That’s the part I want on the record. I felt good about it for about four minutes.

Then the light went off the trees, and I thought, I should be down before dark.

Then Bo got into some water off the side of the trail, and I thought, he should be out of that.

Then I thought, I should have started earlier.

Eleven of them, in about ten minutes. One of them was about him, and it turned out he was fine.

So I stood up in the wind and said the number out loud, because I had nobody else to say it to. Eleven of them, from the top of the ridge to the truck.

The rule lasted four minutes. The word lasted all the way down.

Now I want to be fair to the rule. It was not a bad rule. Rules like that usually last about as long as a good idea does.

The trouble was never that I said it. Everybody says it. The trouble was that I said it out loud, in my own voice, where I could hear it.

So here is the question for today.

Why do we say that word out loud, to ourselves, when there is nobody listening?

That is a ten minute question. I have asked it better than this and got nowhere.

I’ve tried the counting. That’s as far as I’ve got on my own. Counting isn’t an answer. Counting is just a number with the shame taken off it.

So I went and got out the book.

Here is 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’m borrowing.

The name is Lao-tzu, which is a name for an old Chinese book, and also for the man some people say wrote it. Chinese. Tradition puts him in the sixth century before our era. The book itself is probably younger than that. Nobody really knows.

Nobody can prove one man wrote all of it. People have been arguing about that a very long time, and I am standing on a windy ridge.

Here is the situation. A great many people were certain they knew exactly how things ought to be done, and were saying so at each other all day long. Somebody had to write the other side of it down.

Now. The part I want is small, and it is two things.

One of them is a block of wood nobody has carved yet. In the book that block is worth something on its own, before anybody has improved it.

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

A thing nobody has worked on yet isn’t a lesser thing. That’s what the block is for.

The second thing is bending. There’s a passage that says, roughly, that the thing that bends is the thing that stays in one piece.

The stiff branch is the one that snaps in the ice storm. I have the stumps up here to prove it.

Here is mine on that one as well. A way of bending is not a failing of the way. It is the part of the way that makes it work.

And I want to say what I did not take, because I have taken it wrong before.

I am not going to stand up here and tell you what he is against. I do not know that well enough.

What I took is narrower than that. A rule nobody has looked at since they said it is not a rule yet. It is a habit with a coat on.

Here is one of mine, from this week, and it has a thing in it.

There is a gate on the lane up to the house. It has a hinge that doesn’t latch. I’ve told myself for years that I should fix it.

I’ve never fixed it. It has never fixed me. The deer go through it, and I go through it.

That sentence has been running in the back of my head for years, and it has never once cost me anything.

Now the price of holding on to both of those.

If the block is worth something untouched, then there is nothing to point at and say, that one needs work. I lose that sentence.

And if the road that bends is the working road, then the road I already had in my head is not better for being straight. It is only the one I picked.

So here is what is left. Eleven shoulds, and no way at all to tell which of them were the straight road.

Back to the ridge.

The light is going off the scrub now, from the bottom up, which is the way it does.

There is a two track that comes off this ridge a little below the top, where I parked. It bends away to the left and goes down through the trees. I’ve looked at that two track a hundred times, and I’ve never once taken it.

And I know exactly why I’ve never taken it. There’s nothing wrong with the way I came up here. It’s the one I know.

So all afternoon I’ve been calling my own route a shortcut, and it’s not one.

Here is the shape of it, and I’ve been wrong about shapes before. Almost every should is a sentence about a version of your life that did not happen.

The one I liked best was I should have started earlier. That sentence is about a man standing on this ridge when the light was still good, and that man never existed.

Somewhere out there, you’ve said one of these out loud this week. To a dog. To a mirror. Into the car, where it doesn’t count.

And you’ve been saying it all week without noticing. There’s a fair chance the sentence about how it went is a good deal longer. Longer than the one about how you’ll do it better.

Count that too, if you want. I am not holding it against anybody.

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

On the next walk, every time you hear yourself say should, put one finger down on your own thumb.

That is the whole assignment. One walk. You do not have to say them out loud for it to work.

Do not keep a list of the sentences. Just the number.

You will miss some of them. You’ll miss about four in the first five minutes, and then get much better at it, which is what happened to me.

Do not start over when you lose the count. Start again where you were standing.

If the number is small, let it be small. Do not go looking for a bigger one.

And when you’re back inside, say the number out loud so somebody could hear you say it.

That is the only part you have to do. One walk, one number, ten minutes.

If you skip it, you got ten minutes of a man on a windy ridge, which isn’t nothing. It works on the way to the mailbox. It doesn’t want a quiet morning, and it doesn’t want a ridge.

Bo has never said it. All afternoon up here, and never once.