I have been under a doctor’s care of late and am heading out of the city for a few days as a kind of therapy. The fact that I am also accomplishing a family task is no never-mind.

Are you like that? I feel so much better when my time is being well spent. Just sitting is something that is really hard for me to do. I can take a book and be OK with it, or my beading, but to sit without a goal, without a task?

My niece is deaf, and the task is to go get her and take her over to the Washington School for the Deaf for her first week as a boarding-school student. She is super excited to be in a place where everyone can talk to everyone else and as tasks go, apart from the long drive, it is an easy one. I am heading out a few days early (she has to be at school Sunday night) so that I can go up to my favourite mountain lake, swim, sleep and just sit. The thing is I am also taking my beading and my notebooks and a few books of poetry.

I wonder if I will ever again be the kind of person that can go somewhere without something to do?  I used to be at one time. When I went out on the road at 16, hitchhiked and walked until I was 19, I went with a hairbrush (really long hair) as my main luggage. There were books during that time, but mostly, when I’d read them, I put them down for someone else to find. I read Darwin, and Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, and Mao, and the Sumerian myths, and even the Bible. I remember thinking then, in fact some really important understandings came my way during that first 2.5-year trek, but I also remember long periods, long, curved roads when all that I was really aware of was the world around me. The only tension I had then was hunger and sometimes cold.

I guess that the real challenge would be to find a balance between the two states. To once again be able to pick up a task, but then just put it down for someone else to pick up.  The critical thing here is to be OK with the probability that some of my tasks, should I put them down, will simply not get done. I am sure there are the sodden remains of books out on the road somewhere, that, once I left them behind, no one ever picked them up again. And the stakes are higher now. I mean if no one ever picked up my old copy of Flatland? But what if I put down the task of making sure a lost child gets found?