The way it goes on

Last of the light and I cannot see Bo.

The dark has come up the cove from the bottom, which is where it always starts.

The far ridge is still up there. I know it is because the sky above it is a different colour from the sky above everything else.

This is the last long walk I’m going to take before the cold gets properly into it.

Bo’s collar goes about every ninety seconds. That is how I know where he is.

And I have been waiting all autumn to say a thing to you out here. Now I have to say it, and it is much smaller than I had it.

Here is what happened. It has two parts.

The first part is four things.

I wrote two lines a day for nine days in the spring. One line at the top of the day and one at the bottom. Then I ran out of paper.

I wrote one thing I had looked at on a scrap, twenty two mornings running, with a time beside it. Then one morning I wrote nothing on it. I didn’t go back and fill the gap, and I haven’t written on it since.

I wrote one word for my week at the top of a ridge and the wind took the paper off the stump. It is still up in a sycamore. I know what the word was and I can’t get at it.

And I spent three months clearing brush off the base of a tree I never once wanted cut.

That is four. Two of them stopped because something ran out, one stopped the morning I left it blank, and the fourth has never stopped at all.

I have told that story on this trail before, in pieces, over about ten weeks. So I want to put the four of them in one place today.

Because I don’t think they are four things that happened. I think they are one habit, and I have never once seen it while I was in it.

Here is what the four have in common. I started each one on a morning when the last one had stopped going somewhere.

Not always straight after. Two days. A week. Once, most of a winter.

But the start was always a stopping. The new one was on its way because the old one was off.

That is the pattern. It took me four go rounds to see it, and I only saw it because somebody was going to make a list out loud.

Here is the other thing about the four, and it is worse than the pattern.

I didn’t lose any of them.

The sheet from the spring is washed. It was in a coat and the coat went in the machine.

The scrap with twenty two mornings on it is in this coat, in the pocket. I haven’t written on it since the twenty third.

The word is in a sycamore about four feet up, and that one has weather in it by now.

And the brush under the hickory is cut. It is cut this morning, and I walked past it on the way up.

Nothing was thrown away. It just stopped, and everything stayed exactly where I left it.

That is the part I had not put with the rest of it, because I have been telling people I start over.

I don’t start over. I stop, and then I stand next to the stopped thing.

Here is the second part, and it is the one that took me until this morning.

Somewhere in the autumn I decided that starting over was the problem. Not those four things, the habit underneath them. I decided I am a man who keeps opening new paper.

And then, about ten days ago, I decided to fix that. Which is the fifth thing, and it is going extremely well.

I have been on a different ridge three times and a new loop twice.

And I haven’t had one good hour on any of it.

So I came back here. Same ridge, same mud, because at least this one I know.

Bo has come up alongside me, and he has no idea any of this is about anything.

So here’s the question for today.

Why do I keep starting things over, and what does a beginning do to the middle of a thing?

And there’s a second question under that one, and it is worse.

Is the middle the only part worth anything?

I have carried the first one since about the middle of the autumn and I have never once got anywhere with it.

The second one I only heard myself ask about four days ago, and it has not let go since.

I have an answer to the first one. It is old, it is Chinese, and it is about a man with a knife.

The second one I don’t have. I’m saying that now so you can hold me to it in about forty minutes.

Here is where I am borrowing from, and I am standing well outside it 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 Chinese book, and for the man some people say wrote it. Chinese, fourth century before our era.

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

The book is a whole shelf of arguments. Some of it is serious, and most of it is two men enjoying an afternoon.

I have said before on this trail that I haven’t read it in a translation I trust. I’m not going to pretend that has changed.

So what I give you next is what has stayed in my head, and where it is mine you’ll hear me say so.

There is a story in the book about a cook.

And I am going to give you that story at its plain core, and not one step past it.

That is a promise. I have heard a lot of people stretch this one, and I have caught myself starting to.

A cook is working for a lord, and he’s cutting up an ox.

He does it for nineteen years, and his knife is still sharp.

Nineteen years, and the edge is still on it. That is the whole of what the story says about the knife.

And the reason is not that he’s fast. He follows the gaps, the natural places where the animal is already coming apart, the joints and the seams of it. He puts the blade into those and lets the ox do the rest.

And when he meets a part that is hard, a knot in it, he slows down and goes at it carefully.

That is all of it.

And the lord watches all of this, and at the end he says he has learned something about how to look after a life.

That is the story as I have it. Cook, ox, nineteen years, a knife, and a lord who says he has learned something.

I am stopping there.

Here is what I take from it.

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

The knife is sharp because he didn’t spend nineteen years fighting the ox. He spent them in the gaps, and that is where the work went, and nowhere else.

And a man who gets good at something over nineteen years is not fighting it every day. He’s finding the seams, and he’s going carefully at the part with no seam in it.

Now the cost of that, because there’s one and it is not free.

If the knife stays sharp by going easy where the ox is easy, then most of what I called discipline this year wasn’t cutting. I have been holding a hickory I never wanted and a piece of paper with nothing on it.

I’ve been going carefully at the parts with no seam in them. That is what starting over is, and that is all it has ever been.

A beginning has no seam in it. There’s nothing to follow.

So all my care went into the place where there was nothing already open for me, and my blade is going dull on it now.

I want to be fair here, because this can turn into a thing where a man on a ridge congratulates himself for having tried hard.

I didn’t fail at the hickory. The hickory was a bad tree and it is still a bad tree.

I didn’t fail at the paper. Writing two lines takes forty seconds, and it is not evidence of anything except that my handwriting still works.

What I did was spend the whole knife on nothing that had a gap in it.

And here is the part I am least proud of, which is the fifth thing, the new ridge, the new loop.

I did that with a story in my head about a man who had stopped beginning things.

So the discipline went on the fifth thing too. I was careful at nothing, on purpose, and I called it a correction.

A man who goes carefully at a blank piece of paper every morning is not improving. He’s just moving the knife across the same leather.

I want to say that part properly, because it is the whole thing and I have said it fast.

A cook and an ox. Nineteen years. And out of nineteen years of work, the one fact that survives is that the knife is still sharp.

Not that the ox was large. Not that the lord was rich. Not that he was fast.

The edge.

There’s no other way to read that. The only thing anybody would ask you about a man after nineteen years is whether he got better at it.

And he didn’t get better by cutting more. He got better by cutting where the animal was already open, and being careful in the one place it was not.

That is the whole of what I have taken out of an old Chinese book this year.

Now let me tell you what it costs, because this is where it turns over.

If that is what skill is, then almost none of my year was practice.

I want to put the two lists side by side, because the difference between them is uncomfortable.

His year has a seam in it. There’s a thing already open and he goes into it, over and over, nineteen times.

Mine does not. I’ve got a hundred and ninety mornings on this ridge, and there was never a seam in one of them.

Every morning the paper was new.

And there’s a thing I have been calling persistence that I’d now call something else.

Persistence is what it looks like when a man keeps going at the hard part of a thing that has a hard part. I haven’t had the hard part.

I have had the same amount of care, spread over four hundred different beginnings. I threw each one away before I found out whether there was anything in it.

That is not discipline. That is a man who can’t stand a blank page for eleven days.

Which is a different thing, and a smaller one, and I’ve been calling it the bigger one all year.

Now, I don’t want to go over the top of this, and I want to be careful in the other direction too.

There’s a soft version of the idea that would let a man off entirely.

The soft version says the cook had a gift. Some men can find the gap and some can’t, and if you’re the second sort then that is your constitution.

Nothing in that story says that, and I have no evidence for it either way.

What I’ve got is nineteen years of a man who kept at it. That is the least interesting thing about him and the only one I can use.

He didn’t get a gift at some point. He got better, and the better he got the less he was cutting.

That is a thing about practice and not about talent, and it is much less flattering, and I’d rather have it.

And I want to stay on the knife a minute longer, because there’s a word in there I haven’t unpacked.

Gaps.

That is my word, not his, and I am going to be careful with it.

I have heard it used to mean something softer than what I think it means.

A gap is not a weakness in the animal. It is where the animal is already decided.

There’s a difference between a crack and a gap, and everybody who has cut anything knows it and nobody needs it explained.

A crack is where the material would part if you asked it to. A gap is where it will part if you go the right way.

And a man with a knife can tell them apart without thinking about it. That is what nineteen years buys.

Here is what I like most about that, and I didn’t expect to like it.

He’s not being clever. There’s no cleverness in finding where an ox is already coming apart.

It is the slowest possible way to cut. It is going the way the animal wants to go, one seam at a time, for nineteen years.

And the knife stays sharp because a blade that is never forced doesn’t roll over.

That is the whole mechanism. You don’t keep an edge by being careful everywhere. You keep an edge by being ordinary most of the time and careful once.

I have been careful about every one of those mornings.

That is a blade being forced into oak, and oak doesn’t have gaps.

I want to put the thing on the ridge now, because a metaphor that has not been outside is not finished.

There is a sycamore at the low fork where this trail comes off the ridge and starts down toward the creek.

Its bark comes off in strips. Long, wide strips that peel off a whole side of the trunk and come down in one piece.

That is not damage. That is how a sycamore works. The outer layer is finished with the tree and lets go.

And it comes off in one long strip, along one line, all the way down.

You can’t tear it off in the middle. It will not tear. It either lets go whole or it doesn’t let go at all.

There’s a line on that trunk where the tree has already agreed with itself.

Now put a bootlace against that.

A bootlace is flat cotton with no metal on the end, and there are hundreds of those in this cove.

I have lost one. Bo found it in about a minute, put it in front of me, sat down, and looked at me.

I made a whole morning of that lace. Four lost minutes and a wet sock, and I have carried those four minutes since the summer.

That is not the middle of anything. That is the moment before the beginning of a morning.

The whole year, in one word, is going carefully at the bootlace.

There’s one more thing about the fifth thing, and it took me until this morning to see it.

I didn’t go to a new ridge to get better. I went to a new ridge to be able to say I had gone. Those are not the same and I couldn’t tell you the difference at the time.

And there’s a piece of evidence for it, which is that I haven’t gone back.

Ten days, five walks, and nothing on this ridge changed. Not the hickory, not the scrap, not how I look at a fence post.

A man who has gone somewhere to get better comes back different, and I haven’t come back different once this year.

So now I know what the five walks were. They were the walk, and they were not the improvement.

So here is the turn inward, and it is the part of this I like least.

I’ve been calling all of this a mistake in my method.

I haven’t been wrong about the method. I have been wrong about which part of it I am allowed to change.

The habit is not that I begin things. Everybody begins things. You can’t walk one ridge four hundred times without coming to a bend you haven’t looked at.

The habit is that I begin them again before the first one has told me anything.

And I know exactly why, and it is not a deep reason.

It is that a stopped thing gets judged.

A blank paper on the twenty third morning doesn’t say anything. You can put it away and it is only paper.

But a thing that has run three weeks starts to have an opinion about you.

And I’d rather have four things that never got far enough than one that got far enough and then stopped.

That is what I’ve been doing it without saying it. I’ve been keeping my record short on purpose.

I have been choosing, every single time, the experiment most likely to still be running in five weeks.

Which means I’ve never once found out whether I can do a thing for five weeks.

I don’t know that about anything. Not the looking, not the paper, not the walking.

I have four starts and no middle, and I have been telling myself the four starts are evidence that I am willing to try things.

Here is what I actually did, so it is written down and I can’t soften it later.

I had a scrap in this coat with twenty two mornings on it. One thing, one minute, a time beside it.

And on the morning I did not write on it, I felt relief.

Not disappointment. I want that exact word kept. Relief.

And then I carried it for five weeks without touching it, and let it be blank, and told people it had run its course.

Nobody took that scrap off me. It is in the pocket now, and it has been in the pocket for five weeks.

I didn’t have to choose to abandon it. I just had to not go back for it.

And the fifth thing, the new ridge, which I thought was the correction. I did it for ten days and I haven’t had one good hour on it. The reason is that I did it to be a man who doesn’t do that any more.

Which is a performance, and I have never been able to hear a performance from the outside.

I am going to stop being careful for a minute, because the second half of this is not about me any more.

Right, I am going to sit down for a minute, because there’s a rock here and it is dry.

Bo got to the rock before I did and has not moved since. He didn’t ask whether it was free.

Right. I am going to ask for ten minutes of your own walk. I’ll be quiet for most of it, so you can be quiet too.

There’s nothing to set up first.

The one instruction. Find the stretch of your walk that you’ve already decided about.

Not the interesting stretch, the settled one. The bit of the road your feet do without asking you, where you could get home with your eyes shut.

Walk that stretch, and once, do not follow the seam.

Not faster and not slower. Just walk straight through the bit where you would normally come in late or turn early.

That is the whole of it. One familiar stretch of road, and one piece of it walked with nothing already open in it.

Ten minutes of it. If the walk you’ve is shorter, go out once and come back.

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

One. Whatever you’re doing with your attention, you’ll lose it. Mine goes somewhere in the first minute and again somewhere near the sixth.

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. Notice that it had gone, and keep walking.

Two, and this is the real one.

The part of the walk where you stop following the seam will feel wrong. It will feel wrong in a way that has nothing to do with the ground.

You will want to turn back onto the line before you’ve got to the end of the stretch.

Do not. That wanting is the thing under the question. It is not a mistake and it is not a warning.

It is just how much you like the seams.

Three, and this one took me the longest to notice.

Some of you can’t do this on a walk. A walk is where you’re not thinking, and this needs three thoughts in it.

If that is you, do it standing still. Anywhere, in a kitchen.

The instruction is about a stretch of distance, not about feet. The whole practice works in a hallway.

And if you would rather not do any of it, put it down. I am going to keep talking for another half hour either way.

Here is what happens to me, since you can’t see any of it.

Bo has got up off the rock and gone about four feet, and he has turned round twice, and he’s watching me not walk.

A dog has a very short leash on this kind of thing.

About two minutes in I did it. Same trail, same gravel, and I came in about six feet early at the bend by the sycamore.

And the ground there’s fine. It is the same ground. There was no knot and nothing to go around.

I got about ten steps of it and I noticed that I was already building a reason to turn back.

The reason was going to be that the line is better.

It is not better. It is just the line.

And then it went quiet again, in the way it does once you’ve stopped arguing with the plans.

Nothing got solved. I didn’t learn a thing about the hickory or the paper or the fifth ridge.

I walked four hundred yards of a trail I have walked since I was nine years old. About fifty of them were not the ones I’d have chosen.

That is what a middle feels like. It is a very small thing, and I’d like somebody to have told me.

So I am going to do the slow half of this, and there is nobody in it. No old book, no name, just this hill.

I want to take the word seam out of my own head and put it on the ground. A word I made up is not worth very much.

Here is the first thing about this trail that I didn’t put there.

There are two ways up it. The one I take, and a shorter one that cuts the inside of the loop.

The short one is not a path. It goes up through the stuff, it is rough the whole way, and it would take you twenty minutes longer.

And every so often somebody has clearly tried it. There are two or three places where the old growth is broken and the leaves are packed down in a line.

Those lines go nowhere. They stop about a third of the way up and turn back.

That is the interesting part. People have gone round and round finding the short way, for as long as there has been a short way to find.

And this trail is here because it is the shape of everybody being lazy in the same direction.

Not one person chose it. It is the sum of about a hundred and ninety years of feet going the only easy way round the loop.

There’s no plan on this hill anywhere. I have looked.

And yet there’s a seam.

I want to hold those two things next to each other, because I didn’t expect them to be in the same sentence.

A path is not a decision. It is a decision that everybody arrived at separately, a hundred thousand times, without ever meeting.

And when it is worn down far enough, it stops being a decision at all.

It becomes the gap.

Here is the second thing, and it took me about twenty years to see it.

I’ve never once seen this trail being made.

Not in the sense of watching it happen. I mean there’s no moment on it.

No day when it was a plan and then it was a path.

You can’t find the place where the first hundred people agreed, because they never agreed.

One of them went round the long way because he was tired. The next one did the same because he was tired.

And now I am tired in exactly the same place, thirty years later, and my foot goes the same way theirs did.

And that is what a middle is.

That is the thing I’ve been asking about all hour without naming it.

A middle is not the part where something gets decided. It is the part where everybody’s separate tiredness adds up into a line that goes somewhere.

There’s no seam at the start of a trail. There’s only a slope and a lot of people.

Now, the part I have to be careful with, because this can turn into a thing about destiny and I’m not having that.

Nobody chose the long way because it was right. They chose it because they had already done it that morning and their legs knew.

The line is made of tired people being sensible, not of anybody being wise.

And I don’t know how to say this without it sounding like an argument for never changing anything.

Which is exactly the disease I have.

So let me put the objection in before somebody else does.

The obvious objection. A trail worn down by a hundred thousand tired people is a trail made of habit.

Habit is the thing I’ve been trying to break all year.

So why would I want the answer to be more of it?

Here is the honest reply, and it is not a good one.

Because I didn’t break it. Ten days on a new ridge didn’t break a single habit I’ve got.

I have the same twenty two mornings of looking, and I have had them for years. I didn’t lose them on the fifth thing.

What I lost was nothing. I have been carrying the whole trail with me and calling it nothing.

A habit that gets carried from ridge to ridge is not a habit any more. It is a preference, and a preference is a small thing to be frightened of.

The hickory didn’t change because I went to a new loop. I have cut the brush off its roots and I did it for three months, and I’d do it again next week.

There’s no ridge in this county that is going to fix that.

And there’s a second old thing in this half of the walk, and I want to put it next to that one.

The name is Seneca. Roman. He was on this trail earlier in the year and I got him wrong then.

I haven’t read him end to end. I have read him in pieces, and a lot of what I have is other people’s sentences about him.

So I am going to describe a habit and not a book. I can’t point you at the letter.

The habit is this. Write the thought down in the form of a letter, to yourself, dated.

Not a note, a letter. You are on one side of it and the reader is you, later.

You are not allowed to write to make yourself look good, and that is the part that makes it a letter and not a diary.

He wrote letters for a long time, to one man, near the end of his life. That much I am sure of, and it is the only fact about him I need.

What I take from it is the shape. I don’t know whether it is his idea or one somebody handed him and he kept.

Here is what I take from it. A thought in your head is allowed to be beautiful.

The moment it is a letter, it has to survive being read by somebody with an interest in you. Which is nobody.

And that is exactly why it works. The reader has no obligation to be kind.

Now the cost, and this one is the reason I haven’t left it out.

A letter to yourself is still a letter. You wrote it, and a thing you wrote is a thing you now own.

My coat pocket is full of my own handwriting. Every piece of it is something I once decided to keep.

There’s no version of that habit that is not also an accumulation.

I want to put that beside the last thing I said, because it is the same problem seen from the other side.

The trail nobody chose is a thing that got made by a hundred thousand people who were not managing it.

My pocket is a thing I made, on purpose, with my own hands, one piece at a time.

I don’t get to be tired and sensible in both places.

And there’s one more man, and he’s the shortest of the three.

Alan Watts. Nineteen fifteen to nineteen seventy three. He spent his life arguing with this old material out loud, and he made no secret of enjoying it.

Again I didn’t read him in order. I mostly heard him.

The one I want is a distinction he made, or that I got from him, and I can’t tell you which.

There’s a difference between a philosophy you have had and one you have been near.

Near is easy, and near is what everybody does. You read a thing once in a good mood and you carry it around feeling excellent about it.

Had is duller, and it doesn’t feel like anything at the time.

And I can tell you which of those two my year was, and I don’t like the answer.

I’ve been near a great many things this year. I have read a scrap of one and a chapter of another and a paragraph of a third. I have built a whole walking season out of the feeling of having been in the room.

Now. I have said that a knife stays sharp by going easy where the ox is easy. And the old Chinese book in question is full of men who found the gap every single time.

And I’ve been near it for years, and I have never once found the gap in my own life by reading about it.

Which is either a warning about reading or an excuse for not reading, and I genuinely don’t know which.

Now the fire.

And I want to be straight about where the words in it came from, because the walking has taught me that lesson.

I want to be plain about this. I did not collect mail for this. Nobody has sent me anything.

What I have is what people have said to me on this trail, standing here, over about eleven weeks.

I asked one question: what are you carrying that you haven’t put down?

Here is what is left of it. Four of them.

Somebody said a garage sale. That is it. That was the whole answer, and he didn’t add to it and I didn’t make him.

Somebody said somebody else’s mother’s house.

Somebody said a number. He said six, and then he said six thousand, and then he said no, and I’ve never found out which.

And one person I walk with sometimes said, the porch.

I’ve been chewing on the porch for about a fortnight and I’m not going to overdo it.

A porch is not a thing anybody is stuck with. A porch is a thing that is simply there, and you can stand on it or not, and nobody is going to move you.

Four answers and not one of them is about a beginning.

I expected some of them to be about starting things. That was the whole question.

Not one person said a project.

And the two that were most stuck, the house and the sale, are both about getting rid of something. None of them are about getting on with something.

Now the honest case, which is the part the fire is actually for.

Four answers from people I happened to meet on one hill is not evidence about anybody, including me.

It is four words. I wouldn’t build a morning on four words.

Here is the other thing I want to say about it, and it is worse.

Two of those people told me something. I’m not going to say who or what, and I’m not going to play somebody’s hard week back out loud on a trail.

But somebody did, and they told me out here on the path without meaning to, in between two other things.

And the six thousand one I still don’t know the end of.

So there’s no way for me to hold it. And I have been carrying it up and down this hill for a fortnight, which is exactly what they are doing with their own.

That is the part I wouldn’t have written down in advance.

The fire is not me finding out what people are carrying. It is me finding out that I have become one more person carrying something round the same loop.

And there’s a thing I want to say about the numbers in it, because the number is the part that made me stop.

Six. Then six thousand. Then no.

A man can’t remember what he said about his own trouble to five words of precision.

I know that, because I’ve got a coat pocket that says something similar about a fence post and a piece of paper.

So the four of them are not people who are worse at this than me. They are people who have not yet started writing it down, which is the stage I usually get stuck in and call progress.

And I am going to stand up off this rock, because I have been on it longer than I thought and I can feel it.

Bo gets up first. He always does.

The light has gone off the creek and off the sycamores. There’s nothing left on this ridge but the sky being a slightly different black in four or five places.

And that is the hour I keep my time in, so let me use it for something.

I’ve been saying all evening that the four of us who told me something are people carrying things. And then I have been carrying a pocket full of my own paper up and down this hill without once putting it next to that.

So let me put it next to it, properly.

On this ridge, in this coat, right now, there’s a scrap with twenty two mornings on it. There’s nothing at all from the week version, because I never did the week version.

That is one piece of paper, and I’ve been on about sixty walks with them.

I have never once thought of the walks as carrying. I thought of them as the thing I did instead.

A garage sale is a thing somebody has carried up and down for two years, and it has never once been on a piece of paper.

So the four of them are not short of me. I am simply better at it, because I’ve got a coat.

That is not a very grand conclusion for a fifty minute walk, and I’m not going to dress it up.

Here is what I actually think happened to me this year, and it is smaller than the idea I’ve been building on the ridge.

I didn’t carry the things. I stored them.

There’s a difference, and it took me until about a quarter past seven in the dark to see it.

Which is late, and late is on me.

A carried thing goes where you go. A stored thing goes where you put it, and it waits there.

It doesn’t get lighter and it doesn’t get heavier either. It just becomes part of the shape of the coat.

Which is exactly what a habit is, and I’ve been calling the coat a year of my life.

So, the question has had an answer for about ten minutes, and I haven’t given it to you yet.

Why do I keep starting things over, and what does a beginning do to the middle?

I keep starting them over because a beginning can’t be judged, and I don’t want to be judged on the twenty third morning.

And that is the whole reason. It is not complicated and it is not noble.

What the beginning does to the middle is nothing at all. That is what I have learned, and it took a whole year.

The middle is the only part that has a seam in it. That is where the line gets worn. That is the whole of the answer, and it took me four hundred beginnings to hear it.

Now the second question, the worse one.

Is the middle the only part worth anything?

I said at the top of this walk that I didn’t have that one, and I’m not going to pretend it turned up.

What I have is smaller, and it is not an answer.

The middle is where the evidence is. There’s no evidence anywhere else.

You can’t tell whether you can walk a mile by starting one. You can only tell by being somewhere in the middle of it, which is exactly where nobody chooses to look.

That is what I’ve got instead of the answer.

And I have noticed I have spent a season putting off a thing I could have done in June.

Here is the thing to try, and this is the last one I have for a while.

It has two parts, and the second part is optional, and I won’t come back and ask you about it.

The first part is one walk out of a door.

On your next walk, pick one thing you’re carrying and write it down on a scrap.

Not the thing you’re working on. The thing underneath it, the one that has been there long enough that you stopped noticing it.

A garage sale. A porch. A mother. A number you’re not sure of.

Write it in the plainest words you have. Five words is plenty, and six is a book.

Then put the scrap in your pocket and carry it round for the rest of the walk.

That is the whole assignment. One thing, one walk, in your pocket.

Here is why it is on paper, because I have learned that the hard way.

A thing you’re carrying doesn’t get lighter by being said out loud. It gets lighter by being somewhere else afterwards.

The pocket is the somewhere else. That is all it is doing.

Two things it doesn’t have to be.

It doesn’t have to be the big one. If you put down something small and real, that counts, and it will probably be truer.

And it doesn’t have to be finished. A started thing on a scrap is worth more than a perfect one in your head, and I have the coat pocket to prove it.

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

One. You will write something that sounds like a decision.

Go and put down a job. Go and write down the word summer.

That is the old list arriving through the door in a nicer coat.

Two. You will write down the thing you’re meant to be carrying, and not the one.

And then you’ll find out about that one in about six weeks, in the way everybody does.

Three, and this is the real one.

You will carry it round the walk and you’ll feel exactly the same, and you’ll conclude that nothing happened.

Nothing is supposed to happen. Four of the five of us got nothing out of the ten minutes, and Bo is the only one who came off that rock satisfied.

Now the week version, and this part is optional, and I am marking it as optional once and then dropping it.

One walk a day, seven days. Same scrap if you’ve one, or a new one each morning.

One thing carried, written down, put in the pocket.

And on the seventh day, take them all out and read them in the order you wrote them.

Not the last day first. The order.

That is the whole week version. Seven days, one word each, and then the order.

I want to warn you about the seventh day, because I have done a version of this and I know what happens.

You will read them and you will think, that is not what I am carrying.

And that will be true. That is the finding, not a failure of the week.

What you’ve then is a record of what you believed was heavy, in order, over seven days.

I’d put that up against anybody’s own account of their week, and I’d rather have the seven scraps than one good answer.

My question, since this is the last one for a while.

There’s one more thing and it is not an exercise.

If you’ve been walking with me this year, you’ve heard me ask a question out loud about nineteen times.

They were all the same shape: why is this thing happening to me?

And about four of them I have answered, and none of the answers has changed anything.

So I’m not going to ask you for one. You have heard enough of them off me.

I am going to ask you for the one you’ve been carrying and have not said out loud to anybody, including the dog.

You don’t have to write it. That is the whole freedom in it, and not writing it counts.

And you don’t have to bring it back in the spring either. Some of these don’t need finishing. I have three or four, and I’m not going to do anything about any of them, and I have stopped feeling bad about that.

And there’s one thing I haven’t told you, because it didn’t happen until about half an hour ago.

I’ve been carrying this coat for two seasons and I’ve never once looked in the pocket on purpose. I did it on the way up, standing on this ridge, with the dog sitting on my foot.

The scrap is in there. Twenty two mornings, and then five weeks of nothing, and the fold is soft.

And the spring sheet is not, because that coat went in the machine. I knew that, and it is why I wrote it down earlier without noticing I was doing it.

So one of the four is gone and three are on me.

I’m not going to do anything about that tonight, and I have no idea whether I’ll.

The last thing is for me and not for you.

I haven’t decided what the way goes on.

I’ve got a better idea than I had in the spring. The better idea is that the question was never going to be answered by starting over.

And I’ve got a knife that has been dull all year.

I am going to put it down on this ridge and see what happens.

I’m not going to tell you what happens.

The porch is still there in the spring. The sale is still a sale.

And I haven’t started anything yet, and neither have you.

The light is gone, Bo is asleep, and I am going with it.