Wild

Five in the afternoon, second week of a hot one. The sun is coming off the top of this ridge hard enough that the gravel has a look it gets, and the light comes back up at you off it.

Bo is in the only patch of shade on the whole east side, which is a sycamore root about the size of a bathtub. I’ve been out here in this heat for fifty minutes and I’ve got nothing to show for it but this.

Here’s what happened, and it has two parts, and I’ve been carrying both of them since the middle of June. I decided I was going to be wild on purpose. Not once, on purpose, every day, for a week.

I picked a Monday. I’m not going to tell you which Monday. You can all count back and work it out roughly, and I’d rather keep something back.

The idea was that the wild part of me was in the way. Not dangerous in the way, just in the way, the way a coat you can’t wear is in the way when you’re trying to be dressed.

So I decided to give it a job. One small useless thing every day, before I set off walking, picked the night before so I couldn’t pick it in the morning when I was in a mood.

And I wrote them down. Six days out of seven, on a scrap, in a column, which is the wrong way round. I built a small machine to keep score of the times I refused to keep score.

Here’s part two, and it’s the part I haven’t said out loud. On the sixth day I caught myself choosing which useless thing would sound best.

Not doing the thing. Choosing it. There’s a difference and I had it in front of me and I walked straight past it.

So the day didn’t happen. I sat on the step with a list of nine candidates and I ranked them by how they would read. That’s the whole crime and it took me a week to notice it.

Here’s what the seven days actually were, and I can say all of it because I wrote it down. That is the only reason I know it, and I didn’t notice that until just now.

Day one. I sat on the step and watched the light come across the road until the sun hit the fence post, twenty minutes.

I’d call that one a good start if anybody had been watching.

Day two. I read four pages of something I’ve already read, no notes, and I remember being pleased with myself about the no notes.

Day three. I let Bo choose the way and went where he went, which took forty minutes to get nowhere and was the best one.

Day four. I wrote a letter I didn’t send.

Day five. Nothing. I put a mark on the column and wrote nothing under it, and then sat there feeling like I’d cheated on my own homework.

Day six. The audition, which I’ve already told you about. And day seven is the line that says I forgot, which I’m keeping.

And Bo sat on that step with me for the entire time. He had no opinion about it at all. He was asleep with his nose in a leaf.

Seven days and one column. Six of the entries are mine. The seventh is a line that says I forgot, and I’m leaving it in.

So here’s the question for today, and there are two of them.

What is the wild part of me actually for?

And the second one, which is worse. Why does being curious about the Way feel nothing like being calm?

I want to be straight about the second one, because it’s the one I actually want. Being calm is easy to describe and I can do it any day. You’re quiet in a room, your shoulders are down, and you’re not making anybody carry anything.

Curiosity is the opposite of that, and that’s the part I can’t get past. A curious person is not settled, a curious person keeps picking things up, and being curious about the Way means you’re still pulling at the string.

And a person pulling at a string is not calm. So one of these two is not what people think the other one is.

Now, the name is Zhuangzi. Chinese, fourth century before our era, and a name for a book nobody can prove one man wrote.

I’ve borrowed from that book before, more than once. I have also got things wrong in it, which I’ll come back to, because that’s part of tonight.

This time I’m after a cook. That is the whole of it. A cook, and a knife, and an ox.

He has cut oxen for most of his working life, for a lord, and he is very good at it. The book says he cut for nineteen years with one blade and never once had to sharpen it.

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

Here’s the core of it, and I’m going to keep it to the core. When I borrow a story, I keep it to the part I’m sure of.

The knife never dulled. Nineteen years of oxen and the blade is the same blade, and why? Because he stopped cutting the ox. He cuts the places the ox is already apart at.

The joints, where the bone has a gap in it and the meat gives. He found those by doing it for a very long time, and then he stopped sawing and started aiming.

He says the work became easy. He says he was in there, going through the openings, and he says he didn’t have to strain or hurry or think.

And when he has finished, he stands there with the knife, looks around, wipes it clean, and puts it away. His hands are empty again.

That’s the part this whole thing is built on, and it’s the part I haven’t stopped thinking about. He washed his hands, he looked at them, and he was at ease.

His hands were empty and the work was done and nothing was holding him there.

I’m not going to say it better than I just said it.

Here’s what I take from it. The wild part is not the part of you that snarls. It’s not the temper, it is not the appetite, and it’s not the thing you lose on a Tuesday after a bad day.

It is the part that finds the openings.

And the reason a cook is allowed to be calm about a job that should be impossible is this. He has stopped pushing on the places where the thing doesn’t move.

And I want to sit with that for a minute, because it’s the opposite of what I’ve been doing since Monday in June. I’ve been treating the wild part like a thing that needs pushing.

I gave it a job. I gave it a slot in the morning and a column on a scrap. Then I’ve been checking in on it every day, like a foreman doing the rounds.

You can’t make a thing wild by making it a duty. I don’t know how else to say that. It is the same mistake as a person deciding to relax on purpose, and I’ve made a whole thing of that, and I’m not proud of it.

Here’s the actual parallel, and it took me the whole walk to see it. A cook who has to push is a bad cook, and the reason he is bad is not that he is weak.

It is that pushing on the wrong place is harder, not easier. It takes more of you and it gets less done.

So the wild part, pushed on a schedule, doesn’t get tamed, it gets tiring. Those are two completely different results, and it took me until the sixth day to work out which one I was doing.

Back to the ridge, because the book is not the walk. There’s a name I use, three characters put together a long time ago. The Way, the Wild, the Man.

I’ve said those once before and I’m not going to make a speech about them again. But I have been getting the order wrong in my head.

I have been treating the wild part as the middle word, sitting in the middle, being the interesting bit.

And it is not the interesting bit. It’s the part you stand on while you find out what the Way is.

Now, the name is Alan Watts. Nineteen fifteen to nineteen seventy three. English, most of his life in America, and a long stretch of the fifties and the sixties.

In that stretch he was talking to people who had never once thought about any of this old material. Here’s where I’m borrowing from him, though. I’m standing well outside the whole thing and taking one idea out of it, which is the polite way of saying I’m borrowing.

I should say up front that I didn’t read him in order. I mostly heard him, and then years later I read bits, and the bits didn’t add up to a system.

The idea I want tonight is not a complicated one. It’s that there is a part of a person that can’t be improved. Not the whole person, one part of it, and the part that can be improved is the part with a job in it.

I’m going to say that again in my own words, because the second saying is the one that matters. You can get better at a thing. You can be more patient, more accurate, more useful, kinder, faster, and all of that is real and it’s all worth doing.

But there’s a part of you that has nothing to be better at. It has appetites and a mood and a way of walking. You can put that part on a better road, and you can’t improve it into something else.

He also said something I’ve never fully agreed with, and I want to put the disagreement in rather than leave it out.

His way was to say that the whole effort to get on with everybody, to be smooth and successful and finished, is the real problem. Not a solution, the problem.

And I’ve spent a fair amount of my life trying to get on with everybody, which is most of what I do for a living.

So that’s the honest bit. I’ve used him to tell me I don’t have to be finished. I haven’t used him to tell me I can stop trying to be decent, which is the bit I have to not do.

So the second question has an answer, or half of one, and I’m going to take it now and then come back. Why is curiosity not calm? Because calm is what you get when you stop pulling. Curiosity is the pulling.

You can’t be at rest and at the same time reach for something you don’t have.

A person asking why doesn’t have a quiet mind, and a person asking why has a mind like a dog at a door.

That is not a calmer thing. It is a more awake thing.

And there’s a version of calm I’ve been after that is not calm at all. It’s just the absence of a question, and I’ve dressed it up for most of my life as a state to be achieved.

Now the third voice. The name is Thoreau. Seventeen eighty one to eighteen sixty two.

What I want from him is one word and one habit, and the word is baseline. He put a wild thing at the bottom of the argument instead of the top. Most people talk about wildness as the thing you leave, and he put it as the thing you measure from.

And the habit is walking. He did it every day and kept no record of it, and that is the whole difference between him and me. I keep records. That is the difference, and it is not a small one.

I have got a scrap in my pocket with a column on it.

I have checked it every morning for six weeks, like a man who doesn’t trust himself. He would have found that funny, I think. Or at least very interesting.

The baseline does something to the argument that nothing else on this list does. Take the wild out of the bottom and everything above it goes strange.

A person who is trying to be somewhere better and has never once been anywhere else is not going anywhere. He is going somewhere, but he doesn’t know the road has a start.

And I’ve been doing the opposite of that, and doing it deliberately. I live in the middle of the day, with a job and a house. A small set of habits took me twenty years to build.

And I’ve been trying to pull a wild thing out of that the way you pull a weed out of a path. It’s not a weed. It is the ground.

Now the fourth voice, and he is the reason I’m out here. Epictetus. Born about the year fifty of our era in a town in what’s Turkey now. A slave in Rome as a young man, freed, and he taught on the coast for the rest of his life.

He wrote nothing himself. A student of his wrote it all down, and that is why the idea has survived at all. I’ve had him twice already, and tonight is about the one piece of him I haven’t used.

He talks about training, and I want to be careful, because I’ve been on the receiving end of it and I haven’t enjoyed it. Here’s the whole of the idea, at the level I’m sure of, and I’m not going to add anything to it.

He uses a picture of a chariot with a driver, and of a horse with a rider. A chariot doesn’t go anywhere by itself, it goes where the driver takes it, and if the driver is bad the chariot goes badly.

And he says the wildness is not the problem. The problem is the driving.

Now the part I haven’t thought about in twenty years, and I went and got it. The horse is not made into a good horse by being beaten. The training doesn’t turn it into another thing, it turns it into what it can do when somebody is steering it.

And if the going is bad, the thing to look at first is the driver, not the horse. That’s the part I had forgotten, and it has taken me twenty years and one bad week on a step to find out again.

Here’s how sure I’m of that. Certain that he uses the chariot and the horse, and that the point is who is driving. Certain that the beating is not the method. Not certain about the exact shape of the passage, and I’m not going to pretend to be.

So I’m going to talk about the idea and not about the book. Now, the bit that stopped me. He doesn’t say the driver should be gentle and call it kindness. He says a driver is a driver, and the job is to drive well.

And that is a harder thing than being nice, and it is the actual thing. And he doesn’t suggest the horse will thank you, and he doesn’t suggest it becomes yours. It becomes useful and it stays a horse.

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

Here’s what I take from it. You can train the wild part of yourself, and it will still be the wild part of yourself. That is not a failure of the training, that is what a trained thing looks like.

And that is the answer to my first question.

I didn’t expect it to come out of a man who spent his life telling people to get on with it. What is the wild part for? It is what you drive with.

Not what you drive away. Not what you get rid of before you can start.

Now, the honest middle of this, which is the part I don’t enjoy. Because I’ve just been given four arguments for keeping the wild part, and I’m going to sit with the one that doesn’t work.

And it is the one that matches how I actually live. Three of those four say keep it. It is the ground, or the baseline, or the thing you can’t improve, or the thing you drive with.

All of those put the wild part underneath the life, which is tidy, and I don’t live underneath anything.

I live in the middle of it, with a job, a house, a set of people, and a set of habits. About four hundred small obligations arrived one at a time and stayed.

And I’m civil. That is the word for it, and it is not a nice word.

I’m employed, I have a job and I’m good at it.

It would be accurate to say the job has taught me most of what I know about people. And I’m tired.

That’s the actual condition, and I want it in the room before I go anywhere else with this. None of those three things is the enemy. Being civil is not the enemy. Being employed is not the enemy.

The tiredness is the bit I’ve been calling the wild part for about six years, and I would like to hand that back. It is not the same thing, and it is not making anybody’s life better.

Here’s the mistake I made in June, said properly. I decided the tired part was the wild part, so I decided to put it somewhere useful. One useless thing a day, on a schedule, and I’d be well.

And what I actually did was add a job to a person who was already tired. That is it, that is the whole thing. I didn’t fail at being wild, I turned tiredness into a hobby, and then I got up at the same time for seven days.

Here’s what was actually wild in those seven days, and it took me the whole first half of this walk to see it. Not the useless things on the column, which were small and, on five of the seven days, about as wild as a cup of tea.

The wild part was that I was frightened somebody would find out.

That’s what I haven’t said until now, and I’d like it in the record. Not frightened of the answer, frightened of the column, of somebody reading it and doing the thing people do. They say oh that is sweet, and then it is over, and it was never really mine.

So I picked the useless things to be the kind that would survive being said out loud, which means the whole week was an audition. For nobody. For a person who was never going to be there.

That is not wild, that is the opposite of wild, that is a wild thing with a foreman standing over it. And I’m saying it out loud on a ridge in a heatwave instead of quietly, and I’ve watched myself do this in other places. At work. With people I’ve known thirty years.

And the second trail question has a proper answer now, and it is not the one I said earlier. I said curiosity is not calm, which is true and it is small. Here’s the bigger one.

The two questions I asked are not two questions. They’re the same question wearing different clothes, and I didn’t see it until about a mile ago.

What is the wild part for, and why is curiosity not calm. Because the wild part is not a mood, not a treat, not the part of the day that is not work. It is the part that doesn’t have a job.

And curiosity is what happens when the part with no job is left alone and something interesting walks past it. So no, curiosity is not calm. Curiosity is the sound the wild part makes when nobody has put it on the schedule.

Now, the other half of this, and it is not a book, it is about forty yards of this ridge. Hold on, before that, one more thing about the column, because it belongs here and I’ve been walking past it all afternoon.

Bo knew about the week before I did.

He did the whole thing. Every day of that week he lay down in a different patch, deliberately. He stayed there, and he looked at me with what I’d call an expression.

And on the sixth day I was on the step with nine things written on a scrap.

He got up, walked about ten feet, and lay down in a patch of gravel in the full sun.

On purpose. In the heat. He has never done that in his life.

I want to say that I thought this was a message, and I did think that, for about four days. Then I gave it up, because I don’t know what a dog is doing, and neither is the man in the book with the knife.

Here’s what I actually know. It was a hot week. He wanted the gravel.

And that is the whole of the evidence. I’ve been building a philosophy out of a dog being uncomfortable, which is exactly the mistake I’ve spent fifty minutes correcting.

There is a piece of this hillside above the creek that nobody has touched in a long time.

By anybody I mean people and machines both. It is not wilderness, and I want to be careful with that word, because there are opinions about it and I have a job.

It’s a slope with old trees on it and a lot of dead wood lying down, and nobody has cut anything out of it. It is about the size of a small field.

I went and stood in it in June when the week started, and I want to walk you through what’s in there.

I took forty minutes to notice that all of it is the same thing. Every part of it is loose, and that is the whole finding.

Nothing on that slope is being asked to hold anything up. Not the trees, not the wood lying down, not the leaf litter, not the soil. It is all just sitting there being where it is.

And it is full, which is the other half of the finding. Full of beetles, and full of worms under the dead wood, and full of fungus doing its quiet enormous work on a fallen limb nobody will ever cut up.

There’s a limb down there that has been down for two or three years and it’s more alive than a fence post. It has moss on it, and beetles in it, and a whole soft green edge where the bark has gone.

Nothing about that limb is for us, and that is the entire point of it. I’ve had it on a ridge for two months without noticing it was an argument.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about wild ground, and I say that as somebody who has been on a great many ridges. It is not quiet. It is the loudest thing on the hillside.

Whereas my column was silent. Seven days of a thing I was doing on purpose, and the whole thing made no sound at all.

That’s not a small difference, and I want to say why, because it took me two months and a fallen tree. The wild part is not a performance, and it is not a thing you can look good at.

Everything I put on the column was a thing I did, and everything on that slope is a thing that is happening. The difference is that one of those has a day on it and the other one does not.

Now, a word about the word, because I’ve been using wild all evening and I haven’t once said what I mean by it. That would be a bad hour of this.

It doesn’t mean savage, it doesn’t mean uncivilised, and it doesn’t mean the part of you that wants to leave.

It means the part with no job, and that is the definition I’ve arrived at, after two months and a failed week.

I’m aware it is very little for a word people have built whole lives around. I’m aware it sounds like a description of unemployment.

It is not. There’s a difference, and the difference is that the wild part is not idle. It is the only part of you that is not working. Everything else in a person is working.

The part that plans is working. The part that worries about somebody is working. And the part that is polite is working. The part that finds the openings is not working, and that is all I’ve got and I’m not going to dress it up.

One more thing on the definition, and it is the bit I’d most like somebody to argue with. Other people manage the wild part, and they are not being unkind when they do it, and that is the part nobody wants.

Somebody who loves you can hear one raised voice in a week, and it costs them the whole week. And they will manage that voice for you if you let them. I’ve let them.

And I want to say something about that, because I’m not going to tell anybody to be wilder than the people they live with. Being the difficult one in a room is not the same as being wild. I’ve made that mistake with a person who didn’t deserve it.

Here’s the difference as I’ve got it. Being difficult is the wild part with no steering on it. The wild part under somebody’s hand is still the wild part, and it is not costing anybody the week.

That is what the driver was for. The driver is not to make the horse go somewhere nice, it is so the horse is not the one deciding at speed.

And no, this is not an argument for quitting my job. I like the job, I’ve said that before, and I mean it more this week than last. It is also the thing that has taught me everything I know about people, and the thing I couldn’t do in a cabin.

I have no interest in the cabin. The cabin is a fantasy with better weather in it.

Now the second question, the one about curiosity and calm. I’ve got three answers for it. They are not rivals, they are layers, and I’m going to lay them down in the order I’ve got them.

One. Calm is the absence of a pull, and curiosity is the pull, and those are opposite states of the same thing.

Two. A calm person is not asking, and a curious person can’t stop asking. If your day is quiet in your head, the reason is that nothing has got hold of you yet.

Three, and this is the one I didn’t want. You can’t be calm about something and curious about it at the same time. You have to pick, not for ever, for that minute.

I’ve spent a lot of life being calm about things I wasn’t curious about, and calling it maturity. That is the honest case, and I’m not going to dress it up. The whole point of this is that the wild part is not the same as the curious part.

I conflated them for most of June, and I conflated them for a lot longer than June. Tired is not wild. Calm is not curious.

And a mood that doesn’t have a job is not automatically the deep part of you.

Some of the wild part is just bad mood with a low voice. I have a lot of that, and it is not worth an evening.

The part that is worth something looks at the light coming across a road and has nothing to do with the day. That one is worth keeping. I can’t train it and I can’t schedule it, and I’ve now tried both.

Wild is the part of you that is not on the schedule, and curiosity is what it does when something walks past.

And the week I had in June was the opposite of both, because I put the wild part on the schedule. You can’t do that without it becoming the most scheduled part of you.

Here’s the thing about this. I didn’t do the exercise, and I’ve been carrying that as a failure all week. So I’m going to do the fire instead, and I want to be straight with you about what the fire is, because it is not mail.

I haven’t got mail from you. There’s nowhere for you to send it, and I wouldn’t pretend otherwise.

So I asked people I walked with, over a couple of months, one question. I’ve forgotten most of what they said, and I’m not going to invent the rest.

The question was, when did you last do something with no use at all. Not exercise, not a hobby with a result, something where the whole point was that it got you nothing.

Here’s what I’ve left, and it is not much. Somebody said fishing, sat on a bank for two days, caught four fish and gave them all away. Somebody said a jigsaw puzzle with a piece missing, which they kept for two years.

Somebody said they sat in the car in the driveway for twenty minutes before going in. Not on the phone, just sitting. And one of them said they sing in the car, badly, on purpose, which was the whole of it, and he would not go further.

And the last one said nothing for a bit, and then said he doesn’t know, and I don’t think that was a shrug. I think it was the actual answer.

I have been chewing on that one for a week, and it’s the same week as the column, and I’m not going to pretend those are separate.

Here’s the honest reading, and there are two of them and I can only hold one. Either there is a use for most of the useless things people do, and the ones I wouldn’t call useless are the ones nobody has found a use for yet.

Or the whole category is thin, and the rare bit where somebody has done something with no use at all is genuinely rare, and I’ve been living in it for a month by accident.

I don’t know which one it is. What I know is that four out of five of them involved getting out of the house, and none of them involved a schedule. None of them were on the column.

That is the part that stung, and it is also the part I haven’t said out loud yet, and I’m saying it now.

Before I go on, I want to walk round that slope once more.

There’s one thing on it I haven’t said, and it is the best thing there. At the top of the loose ground, where it meets the ridge, the trail has worn two ways round a stump. It has never closed up.

Two lines about eight inches apart, both round the same obstacle, and both going nowhere in particular. And every walker who comes along this ridge has taken one of them or the other.

Nobody planned that. Nobody chose it. It is just where feet have gone so many times that the ground has given in along both lines.

And the thing I’ve been chewing on since June is that the two lines are now the only hard surface up there. That is what gets a path into the woods, not the machine. Feet, enough of them.

And the two lines are doing a job neither of them was ever asked to do, which is making a trail. That is all, and they will keep making it for as long as people keep walking past a stump.

I want to be careful here, because I can hear myself getting pleased, and getting pleased is where I usually go wrong. So here is the honest bit about that.

I didn’t make the two lines. I’ve walked both of them.

I picked one in about four seconds without thinking, and I’ve picked the same one every time since June.

Which is a small thing, and I’m telling you about it because the small thing is the whole point.

The wild part, the one with no job, is the one that picks the line round the stump in four seconds, and the picking is not a virtue and it is not a lesson.

It is a body on a slope, going the easy way round an obstacle, at whatever time of day it happens to be going.

I don’t want to improve that. I want to leave it exactly as unremarkable as it is.

And now I want to say why this exists at all.

It is the one I told you at the start would be about us.

There’s a mark I use, three characters put together a long time ago. I’ve said them once before and I’m not going to explain them again.

The middle one is the one everybody hears first, and I’ve kept saying it is not the opposite of the first one. But I never actually answered what it is for.

All of us are that, and that is not new, I said it before.

What is new is that I spent six weeks trying to make it into a hobby, and a hobby is not a thing anybody is.

It turns out the wild bit was never on the column. The wild bit was the rest of it, and the column was the part of the week I could report.

Back to the ridge, because there is a light thing happening on it and I haven’t looked at it in an hour.

The sycamore by the water at the bottom of the cove has a root down in the bank, and the bank has gone with it. The whole thing is out over the edge now, hanging, and it is going to be on the ground before I’m done talking.

That tree is not being brave and it is not doing anything. It has simply got more root than bank, and one morning that is going to run out of bank.

It will be on the ground this week. Then next spring it will put out shoots along the whole fallen length, because that is what sycamores do when they are down.

And I’ve been trying to make the wild part sound like a virtue for an hour and a quarter, and there is a tree out here that just got knocked over.

One takeaway, and then I’m going to hand you the week. The wild part is not what you do when you’ve time, it is what you haven’t managed to put on the schedule. And curiosity is not calm, curiosity is the schedule being empty.

Right, so here is the part you do something in, and this one is longer than my usual. I’ll tell you why before we start.

I’ve spent fifty minutes telling you a column of useless things is not the point, and it would be a strange thing to then hand you a longer column.

So this is not a list of things to do, it is one thing done seven times, and it is about leaving a gap rather than filling one. You can do the first one on a walk to the mailbox, and the week version is the same thing seven times, and it is optional. I’ll mark it as optional twice.

One instruction. Once a day, for seven days, find a gap in your day that you were not going to lose. That is it, a gap, a piece of time with nothing in it that you chose and nothing was put there.

Not an hour. Ten minutes is plenty, and ten minutes is easier to lose track of, which is part of the point.

Here’s what makes it hard, and I’m not going to pretend it is easy, because I’ve tried it twice and lost twice. The hard part is that a gap in your day looks exactly like a piece of the day you’re going to waste.

When you find one, your whole system will come at you. Not in words, in a small feeling in the chest that says there is something more important to do with those ten minutes.

And sometimes there is. I’m not going to tell you there never is, because that would be a lie and it would make the whole thing easy.

Here’s the rule, and it is the only rule. Not before you’ve finished the day’s actual thing. After. The day’s actual thing first, and then the gap, because otherwise this is a way of feeling virtuous about your own procrastination, and I’ve done that and I’m not recommending it.

Now, what to do in the gap.

Nothing.

That is the whole instruction.

You don’t have to do a thing in the gap, and you don’t have to sit with your eyes shut and be spiritual about it. The gap is the exercise, the gap is the thing that counts, and there is nothing to do inside it.

I know that is a hard sell, because I’ve watched myself talk myself out of things like this. So, because I’m extremely good at ruining a good idea, here is what to do when it goes wrong.

If you can’t find a gap, that is common and it is not a failure. It usually means the day is full in a real way, not a pretend way.

In that case do the smallest possible version, find one minute, one minute between two things while a kettle boils.

One honest minute beats seven impressive gaps, and I’d like you to do one honest minute.

If the ten minutes fills itself, and something arrives, a message, a person, a thought about a thing you haven’t dealt with, then don’t push it out.

Let it come, and then let it be there, and stay in the gap for whatever is left of the ten.

That is the part that actually does the work, and the gap that stays empty is the rare one.

If you get to the end of a day and can’t remember which gap you made, that counts.

I want to say that clearly, because the whole point is that it shouldn’t feel like anything.

A gap you remember is a thing you did, and a thing you did goes on the column.

A way to know it happened, so it is not a mood. You know because the thing you had meant to do in those ten minutes is still there, still not done, and you’re still here. Nothing completed and you’re still there.

Now the smaller version, for today, if you want one thing right now.

Walk to wherever you were going to walk, or walk past something, and once on that walk leave one gap in the middle of it, just a stretch of it where you stop being useful.

Ten steps is enough. Ten steps where you’re not going anywhere and not getting there any faster.

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

If you want to go further with it, there is the week version, one gap a day for seven days, and it is optional.

Write them on a scrap by the door, not on a phone, because a phone will tell you how long you’ve been in it and then you’ll be doing it for the wrong reason.

Don’t do them in the same place. Change the route or the time of day, because the gap is easier to find in a morning and harder to find in the evening, and you want both.

And don’t do them all in one week if the week is a bad one, because two is a success, honestly.

I did two out of seven when I started, and I didn’t improve by wanting to. That is completely optional, and I’d like you to do it, and those two things are both true.

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

If you skip all of it, you’ve got fifty minutes of a hot man talking about a column, which is not nothing.

The sycamore is still hanging there over the bank, being patient with me. Bo has not asked me a question all evening, and he wasn’t going to.

One more thing, and then I’m done.

If you do the gap thing and it turns out to be awful, that is not the exercise failing.

That is the exercise working, and you won’t be able to tell the difference for about a week.

And if it turns out to be lovely, be suspicious. Lovely is how it starts.