The woods are calling

It was a productive Sunday afternoon. I’d just finished dusting and was about to sort two baskets of laundry when I glanced out the window. With so many leaves off the trees now, the view from the kitchen to the state park hiking trail that runs behind our back yard was unobstructed. Words floated into my head: “I cannot bear the fact that I am not walking in the woods right now.”

I thought for a moment about all the reasons someone might look out this window and say those words. Because they were too ill or injured to leave the house and reach the walking trail. Because they were taking care of someone else – someone ill, injured or simply too young to be left alone -- who needed their presence. Because there was an impending hurricane or tornado that would make woods-walking too dangerous. Because night had fallen and there was a risk of getting lost in the dark.

But none of those was the case. I was experiencing a physical yearning to be out walking in the woods, and instead I was…dusting and doing laundry. In short, nothing that really needed to be done.

And at that moment, the decision I’d made earlier in the day to focus on housework and my To Do list reversed itself. I put on boots and retrieved the dog’s leash. The dog herself needed no summoning; she was at my heels as soon as she saw the leash in my hand. We headed out.

I told myself it would be just a short walk, the easy twenty-minute loop from our yard down to the brook, across the esker and back. But once I was heading down the trail with the house behind me, dusting and laundry seemed a lot less important than they had ten minutes earlier. It was warm out, and despite last weekend’s time change, there was still plenty of light in the sky. An owl somewhere overhead hooted repeatedly. I’ve learned since moving to this house near the state park that I was wrong all my life in believing owls were solely nocturnal; we hear them throughout the day.

There was something so compelling about the urge to get out into the woods as I looked out the window to the trail. Maybe my sense of urgency had to do with the awareness that this option is temporary – we’re renters with less than a year left on our lease, and might not be able to walk through our back yard and into the state park much longer – and, of course, on the larger scale, any number of twists of fate could end my ability to go walking in the woods of Great Brook Farm State Park. Or maybe it was because I’ve been reading a lot of Thoreau lately and noticing, time and again, that Thoreau and I have in common a passion for walking equal to (in his case) or much greater than (in mine) our interest in nature itself. Thoreau had no family at home to take care of; he didn’t worry much about dusting and laundry. But he’s not here anymore to walk through the woods of New England, as far as I know (though I concede I could be wrong about that). I felt like I needed to do it for him as well as for myself.

Robert Frost said that the woods are lovely, dark and deep; my feeling yesterday was that the woods are also unconditionally welcoming. They didn’t make me feel guilty for not visiting them sooner, or for considering briefly that something else – housework – might be more important. They didn’t make demands or ask questions. They just welcomed me.

And after forty-five minutes, I was back home, free to dust and sort laundry for the rest of the afternoon, just as I’d wanted. Except I wasn’t even sure why I’d wanted that anymore, when the woods provided so much more solace than the housework.

 

The oldest task on my To Do list

The oldest item on my Google calendar Tasks List is 367 days old.

I’m happy to say that this is the exception, not the rule. In general, I take my To Do list pretty seriously. That’s not to say I get to every item the very same day I list it, but usually I do it within forty-eight hours or so. And if I haven’t crossed it off within a couple of days, I rethink whether it even belongs there.

A good two decades into adulthood, I’ve come to realize that To Do lists should function not as lists of wishes, aspirations or goals, but as lists of tasks – whether work assignments, household chores or errands – that really and truly must get done. Therefore, if I start to run more than a day or two late on any particular To Do item, I instead question just how high a priority it is, whether I really plan to do it at all, if it’s equally essential as the items on the list that I am getting to, and whether there’s perhaps a better time to try to get to it. And then, most of the time, it gets reassigned to a future date.

But the item that I listed on October 25 of 2011 was one I just couldn’t bear to let go of, even as I also apparently couldn’t motivate myself to do it, a full year later. Namely, reading the collection of Thoreau writings that I’d bought last fall.

I really wanted to do it. I really intended to do it. But I just couldn’t seem to get to it. And while I seemed unable to get to the reading, I seemed equally unable to treat Henry David Thoreau as dispassionately as I treat the other items on my To Do list, those that I knock off the list or save for another time if they haven’t justified their importance after a couple of days. Poor Thoreau just sat there languishing in the overdue items column as the listing went from days to weeks to months to finally a year overdue.

But now I can finally cross the item off. Oh, I haven’t read the whole collection yet, but I’ve finally started it, a year and two days after first meaning to get to it. That’s because I found a convenient trick. On my birthday earlier this week, my sister sent me the same Thoreau collection as an e-book. And I synced it onto my phone. Which means even if I remain unable to find the time to sit down and give poor Thoreau my undivided attention for hours on end, I can sneak a peek practically any time I want to, just by glancing at my phone screen. While I’m frying pancakes. In line at the post office. Cooling down after my run. On hold with customer support. Waiting for the movie to begin.

Thoreau himself, I suspect, would hate this. He’d despise not only the technology I rely on in general but also the fact that his writings are now making use of that same technology, and the fact that I was so nonchalantly willing to exchange hours of fireside reading for a quick peek at a 2x3 inch screen.

Well, yes, but it’s better than nothing. For 367 days, I’ve made no progress on this one item on my To Do list. Then yesterday I downloaded the text and started reading the introduction. It probably wouldn’t be good enough for Thoreau, but he didn’t have children’s breakfasts to make, commutes to endure, or customer service on-hold queues. The original hard-copy version of the book of Thoreau readings looks pretty as a decorative object on our hall table, but the e-book is actually getting read, at long last. And my To Do list once again has nothing older than two days on it.it.

Accounting for time -- whether in a weekend or a lifetime

This was the weekend of our annual retreat, and it’s a weekend that inevitably goes by too fast. For the past eight Januarys, I’ve joined a loosely structured group of about 20 other women – most from Carlisle, some formerly of Carlisle, and some from elsewhere who are brought along by Carlisle friends – for a trip to the northeast corner of Connecticut, where we spend Friday evening through lunch Sunday in a hundred-year-old house, reveling in our free time, enjoying silence, taking walks along country roads, and eating meals that are in fact quite tasty but whose greatest merit is that they are cooked by someone else, the retreat house’s kitchen staff.

“This is how life should always be,” someone always says, and of course they mean the relaxed conversation, the leisurely mealtimes, the camaraderie. But as I was thinking about how I wanted to spend my time, I realized how much meaning that phrase actually held for me.

Because the only problem with the weekend is that the time always goes by too quickly. I start out with plans to do lots of writing, and some reading, and go for a long run and take several walks. But then I get caught up in conversations, or just distracted by the option of having seconds at mealtime.

This time, I resolve each year, I’ll plan my time really carefully. It’s less than 48 hours in all; I need to make every second count. Conversation is important, yes; but don’t use it as an excuse not to pursue more difficult options like writing. And yes, the mealtimes are lovely here, but don’t linger at the table for so long that you end up skipping that afternoon walk.

And at some point it occurred to me that in that sense, the retreat weekend really is a lot like how life should be – or at least my approach to the weekend was how my approach to life should be. Camaraderie matters, but so does reflection. Don’t let laziness – or weather – keep you from enjoying the outdoors. Above all, don’t let the time squirm away from you, unaccounted for. Figure out what matters to you and make sure you’ve set your priorities, because your time at the retreat house is really limited, and the weekend will be over before you know it.

The words had a familiar ring, and then I realized that Henry David Thoreau said the same thing only a hundred orders of magnitude more eloquently when he wrote “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I have not lived.” Yes. That’s exactly what I was trying to tell myself. Time is limited; use it wisely and well. Above all, be aware of the choices you’re making before it all melts away.

I did end up using my time well during the weekend. I visited with the other retreat-goers over meals and during discussion group sessions, but I also spent hours reading and walking. It’s trite to acknowledge Thoreau’s wisdom, but that’s how I feel. He said it far better than I could, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use his words as a guidepost. Rules to live by, in effect, whether for the weekend or for a lifespan.

Trail walking

I’m not sure why it took me so long to follow through on this resolution, but at last I am.

Six months ago, we moved to a house perched on the edge of a state park. Even though I’ve long known about this state park, and lived just a few miles from it for most of my life, I’ve never spent much time in it, and the few visits I did make usually didn’t go beyond the ice cream stand at the park headquarters. One truth about living in Carlisle is you seldom need to drive anywhere to find a good place for a walk, and so I almost never bothered to make the trip.

Now, though, it’s not a drive; it’s literally a walk into the woods bordering our back yard to pick up the trails network. And as soon as I realized how close we were, I was intrigued, hoping this would finally spur me on to become acquainted with Great Brook Farm State Park, far beyond the headquarters and ice cream stand section of it and deep into the dense woods beyond.

But for several months, it didn’t. Our new house is at the far end of the park, so our initial forays were only to figure out which trails led to ice cream. We did that several times over the summer, but we didn’t stray much from that path, once we’d figured it out. And when ice cream didn’t tempt us, the mosquitoes were too strong a deterrent for us to want to explore much farther afield.

Now, though, I’ve renewed my resolve. This park covers more than 1,000 acres of fields, forest, wetlands and farmland, and I want to become familiar with all of it. But I have a notoriously dismal sense of direction, so I want to learn my way gradually and thoroughly.

My first step was to take the familiar route to the park headquarters last weekend to pick up a trail map. And after that, I was well on my way. I tried following one trail on my own last weekend, another trail with my friend Donna on Columbus Day, a third option with the dog during a midweek break from writing. I found that the trail map was actually quite easy to follow, and the more I tried different routes, the more I started to gain confidence I’d never had before in my orienteering abilities. The topography began to look a little bit familiar in different places, and the compass points almost always lined up with my sense of where they should be.

Last year, I made a different resolution: to become better acquainted with the works of Thoreau. I made a little progress toward that end, but not as much as I’d hoped; and then over the summer I received as a gift a copy of The Quotable Thoreau, which is sort of like the Cliff Notes version of Thoreau’s work, perfect for literary dilettantes like me. Now, I feel like the two endeavors – reading more Thoreau and getting to know the trails of Great Brook Farm State Park – are complementary. Thoreau writes about walking in the woods, and that’s just what I’ll be doing. So I hope the two projects will fuel each other.

So far on my walks through the woods, I’ve seen ponds large and small; green, yellow, red and orange leaves; other people walking; birds; a log cabin; a Colonial-era stone foundation; and yes, lots and lots of mosquitoes. But the mosquitoes will soon be waning as colder weather arrives, and I plan to still be walking. So let’s hope this is one of my few resolutions that sticks, because there are a lot of acres of woods out my back door. And a lot of Thoreauvian passages to read. But I have time, I think. I just need to stay resolved.

Thoreau's three chairs and my Old Home Day weekend

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. - Henry David Thoreau

Over the holiday weekend, I kept thinking of this Thoreau quotation, one that has always appealed to me. For no reason that I could explain, I felt as if I had removed some of the chairs from my holiday room.

Along with leading into the Independence Day holiday, this was Old Home Day weekend in Carlisle. Old Home Day weekend is a huge deal in Carlisle. It’s the weekend the whole town shows up for, or at least that percentage of the town not yet off to their summer homes in Nantucket or their safari vacations in Nairobi – but that’s still a surprisingly large number of people, for such a small town.

People love it for its old-fashioned community spirit, and being in the thick of the crowd is all part of the fun. Most years, I’m absolutely on board with all of that. But for some reason, this year I just wasn’t into it. I didn’t feel like joining the throngs at the country fair or cheering for the soapbox derby. I stepped out of my usual role of chairing the pie contest. I didn’t buy tickets for my family to attend the chicken barbeque at the fire station.

Perhaps most tellingly, I didn’t register for the road race. Running five miles with a hundred other people didn’t appeal to me this year. And yet I did run five miles (actually 5.2 miles) on the morning of the Old Home Day road race, and I started only about a half-hour after the race’s start time. So it wasn’t the distance of the run nor the early hour that turned me off this year. It was just a year that I felt like running alone.

Nonetheless, it’s not like I spent the weekend in solitude. My eight-year-old was intent upon entering our dog in the Old Home Day pet show, so all four of us headed up to the town center in time for that event. And that turned out to be just about enough for us. Rather than spending the whole day amidst the throngs, like we normally do on Old Home Day, we spent fifteen minutes at the pet show (just long enough for Holly to win a free ice cream by answering several questions about the dog), took a walk along the main thoroughfare, bought a couple of snow cones, browsed at the used book sale, and headed back home.

In fact, the best part of the townwide celebration as far as I was concerned was Sunday evening’s outdoor concert, held on the school’s baseball field. It didn’t attract much of a crowd, in part because a couple of hours of drizzle were just winding down and in part because as the very last event of the weekend, it comes at a time when a lot of families are just worn out. Not us, though. We were feeling energized after such a mellow weekend, and we had a wonderful time listening to bluegrass music and eating ice cream. No contests, no prizes, no dunking booth, no blue ribbons, no announcements. At least this year, it was my favorite part of Old Home Day weekend.

In past years, I’ve thrown myself into the town spirit at Old Home Day weekend: greeting, chatting, racing, competing, cheering, taking part in all the activities that make this event what it is. Those are the years I put out my three Thoreau-inspired chairs and welcome society. This year was different. It was a one-chair weekend for me, metaphorically speaking. Maybe next year I’ll be back up for full-on community spirit. I don’t know why this year I felt so different, and I imagine the pendulum will swing back in another year. But Thoreau reassures me that all of those choices are mine to make: solitude, friendship, society. And when the time comes, I’ll be ready to put out all three chairs once again.

The everyday-ness of feeding cows

Heading back from feeding the cows yesterday morning, I found myself musing. Why do I enjoy this so much? Why is it so satisfying, day after day? Why do I find no particular relief in having a couple days off from the duty, as I did last weekend when I went up to Maine leaving my husband and son with the barnyard chores? Why do I never accept my father’s offer to take a turn with cow-feeding, a job he did on his own here for more than two decades before I offered to take it on a couple of years ago?

It’s hard for me to explain why this job is so satisfying. Unlike dogs waiting to be fed, the cows don’t greet me with ecstatic displays of welcome; they just swing their big heads around to watch me enter the barnyard. Our dog jumps irrepressibly with excitement when we offer her the simplest gesture of affection; the cows and bulls, on the other hand, seem almost patronizing as they submit to a scratch between the ears when I walk amongst them, but they certainly don’t seek out my attention. They just wait stolidly for their bales of hay to be tossed down from the loft or pulled out from the back of the barn, and then they wander eventually over to the water trough to see that I’ve topped it off for them.

But leaving the barnyard always gives me a sense of accomplishment different from anything else I do during the day. Not a bigger sense of accomplishment, necessarily, but in some ways a more unequivocal one. And I suppose that’s because the job is physically demanding but also easy. I haul a few bales, turn some valves on the pump, take off my gloves to manipulate the chain closure to the gate, reach and stretch my arms and legs to climb up and down the hayloft ladder; but really it’s all easy. Very little can go wrong; it’s unlikely that on any given day I’ll find any of these simple processes impossible to execute.

So perhaps the satisfaction comes from that combination: knowing I’ve worked hard physically, but also knowing it’s more or less a sure thing that I’ll complete my task in the course of fifteen or twenty minutes. And when I’m done, I’ve filled that most primal of needs: provided food and water to fill an animal’s stomach. What could be easier, and yet what could feel more critical at the time it’s being executed?

Curious about how something so routine could continue to be pleasing, day after day, I resorted to the question I often pose to myself these days: WWHDTS, or What Would Henry David Thoreau Say? In his journal from 1841, I found this quote: “Routine is a ground to stand on, a wall to retreat to; we cannot draw on our boots without bracing ourselves against it.”

Is feeding the cows every morning the routine against which I brace myself as I draw on my boots to advance through the rest of the day? I like that image, the idea that the sturdy everyday-ness of this task fortifies me for whatever follows. Perhaps that’s the answer: I’m fortifying myself as I fortify the cows: them with hay and water; me with the routine of caring for them. Maybe they don’t show the overt enthusiasm of dogs at my arrival, but I know they wait for me every morning, and I know their day becomes better when I appear. And it might be that that’s enough.

How early is early?

One of the first lessons I took in as I began my informal study of Thoreau this week was how much he valued the early morning hours. To hear Thoreau tell it, we could all be much more exalted, efficient, morally well-served and aesthetically blessed individuals if only we took better advantage of the early morning hours by starting our day earlier.

“The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour,” he wrote. “Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. … All memorable events, I should say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere.”

Reading these words, I became an instant convert. “That’s it!” I thought to myself. “To take another step toward the person I want to be…I just need to be up earlier in the morning!”

But then I remembered something. I already get up at 5:30. Just how early did Thoreau mean? For that matter, just how early did he himself arise?

If I continue with my 2011 goal of becoming more familiar with his work, maybe I’ll be able to deduce an answer to that question. Even if he doesn’t name the time at which he rises, I imagine there are clues in his writing. Where he so often focuses on observations of nature, there must be numerous passages in which I could match his description of available light to the season to figure out whether he was bathing in Walden Pond – which the same passage referred to as his first activity of the day – at, say, 7 a.m. as opposed to 4 a.m.

On weekdays, I set my alarm for 5:30 so that I have time to write my 1000 words of Morning Pages, per the method of writing instructor and author Julia Cameron, and ride my stationary bike for 45 minutes before the kids wake up and need breakfast. (Actually, the image of my kids waking before I’ve had a chance to finish exercising and demanding breakfast right away is something of a mental relic from when they were babies. These days I have to nudge them into wakefulness several times and urge them to ingest something in time to catch the bus. So it’s not a matter of them being demanding, just the demands of the school day and its time-specific schedule.) When I’m done biking on weekday mornings, I wake the kids, make their breakfast, give the dog her breakfast, let the dog out and back in, and then head out to the barnyard to give the cows and sheep their breakfast, with the goal of getting back to the house in time to eat something myself before I have to hurry to catch a shower and still get Holly out to her bus on time. (Tim takes responsibility himself for being on time to catch the middle school bus, but I still have to ensure that all the pieces are in place to get him out there: food, vitamin, teeth-brushing reminder, lunch packed and ready to go.)

Nonetheless, Thoreau’s description of the value of greeting the dawn seduced me momentarily. So that’s what I need to do!, I thought to myself. Thoreau did not have children who needed breakfast, nor did he have livestock to feed, and he certainly didn’t have a schoolbus schedule to comply with. He also didn’t feel obligated to spend 45 minutes on the stationary bike; he spent much of the day walking through the woods of Concord and probably had no need of supplementary exercise.

But all of this is really beside the point. Just how early would I have to set my alarm for to gain even more benefits of the morning than I already do? Maybe 4:30. Objectively, I can imagine that in the heart of the summer I would witness breathtaking sunrises if I were up at that hour, and surely reap some of the rewards of this greater exposure to the natural world that Thoreau espouses. At this time of winter, though, I don’t think 4:30 would feel all that much different from 5:30. It would still be cold, and dark as pitch, and I’d still be drowsy.

And so for now I don’t plan to recalibrate my mornings. A year ago, I wrote of the resolution to get up earlier on weekends, when unlike weekdays I don’t really have to. That resolution succeeded somewhat. It’s hard for me to resist the temptation to bask in sleepy splendor on Saturday and Sunday mornings until about 7, or more specifically until the 7 a.m. news headlines have been read on NPR, but I’m usually up by 7:10. That’s a whole hour earlier than was typical before I made that resolution a year ago.

It’s a start, and for now it will have to do. I’m pragmatic enough to acknowledge that rising earlier wouldn’t make me able to write like Thoreau or even to see the world through the perspective of Thoreau, and at the moment I don’t feel like the hour my alarm goes off is a worthwhile target for self-improvement. To me, 5:30 on weekdays feels early enough, and I’ll just have to seek extra self-improvement after the sun comes up to compensate for whatever I’m missing out on.

Sunlight and mist

Somewhat unexpectedly, I’m starting the year with some breathing room.

Usually, the kids’ return to school after a vacation – be it Christmas vacation, summer vacation, either of the two that fall in between, or even a long holiday weekend – finds me almost frantic to get back to work, with a pileup of deadlines to meet, stories to pitch, facts to check, and corrections to submit: a range of work-related items I simply couldn’t find the mental focus to take care of while they were home.

But last week wasn’t like that. It’s not really that my client list or writing load has diminished any – which is a good thing – but just that a lot of work was due just before Christmas, leaving almost none due after. It’s time to replenish the pipeline as the new work week begins.

But in the meantime, as I wait for responses on pitches I’ve just sent off and edits on work I submitted before Christmas, I’m in a little bit of a lull, which is a rare situation for me. So I’m thinking about ways I can improve my writing, and particularly my blog, in 2011.

For one thing, I’m hoping to learn more about nature writing, particularly by becoming better acquainted with the work of Henry David Thoreau. I’ve already collected several books toward this goal; the trick now is to read them, in hopes that they will educate me about how to describe the scenery around me, which of course is nearly identical in topography to – and just six miles away from – the Walden Pond landscapes about which Thoreau often wrote.

“A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town,” he said, and I need to keep this in mind: the goal is not simply to have the natural world be more often the focus of my writing, but to make my observations worthwhile and meaningful.

Late yesterday afternoon, just before sunset, I looked south over the pasture where the cows graze when it is not covered with snow, as it is now. A very foggy day was ending; the air was so whitened with misty vapor as to look almost as if snow were falling, but the air was warm, nearly fifty degrees. Most of the day – including the 7:30 a.m. hour when I went for a three-mile run – had featured heavily overcast skies, but the clouds were parting as dusk drew near. Although the air was still suffused with mist, a thin yellow film of sunlight beamed down from the sky, so that if you looked straight ahead over the pasture you saw the thick white mist but if you looked upward you saw the parted clouds with sun shining through.

What a perfect metaphor for the New Year, I thought to myself. A thick haze if you look straight into it, but a beam of sunlight and clearing skies if you look just a little bit higher. I resolved to keep that image in mind as I took my first steps into 2011. A lot is hazy about what lies ahead right now, including but also beyond my near-term workload. Above it, though, is light shining through, just as light always eventually does. I’ll remember as this new year begins to try to look beyond the thick haze, remembering that illumination is within sight if you just remember in which direction to cast your gaze.

Thoreau could say it much better, I’m certain, but it’s a start.

Seven steps to stress-free; one step to joy

Amazon.com thinks it knows what I should read. And so it regularly gives me recommendations. I understand where these recommendations come from – most of the time. They come from an algorithm that relates books I’ve not purchased to books I have purchased, or at least viewed. Or else it makes connections based on gifts I’ve ordered for other people that have no relation to my own interests at all: for example, three years ago I bought my brother-in-law a home-brewing kit and I’m still getting recommendations from Amazon that I buy “Make Moonshine by Midnight” and similar quick-help guides to homemade spirits. My son likes fantasy fiction, so plenty of covers featuring dragons and knights march across my Amazon home page. And, like a lot of people, I took a quick peek last week to see what all the fuss over Amazon’s suddenly questionable sales standards involved, so I will apparently be getting recommendations for how-to books that, if the instructions within were followed, would probably land me in jail.

But sometimes I’ll see a recommendation that is neither quite so off-the-wall as the moonshine handbooks nor quite so obviously targeted as a new novel by a writer whose last book I bought. And then I just look at the title and say, “You think I should read that? Yeah, maybe. I suppose it might make sense…”

This was the case when earlier this week Amazon’s recommendation for me was “Addicted to Stress: A Woman's 7 Step Program to Reclaim Joy and Spontaneity In Life.”

“Addicted to stress?” I mused, puzzled. “I’m not addicted to stress. I’m not even that stressed.” Sure, I have plenty of plates to spin at once, from work assignments to the kids’ activities to volunteer tasks to household upkeep to planning for the upcoming holidays. But stressed? Not overly. And, moreover, addicted to stress? I don’t think so.

Yet the title made me wonder. Seven steps to reclaim joy and spontaneity in life? On the one hand, that sounded like a lot of meticulously prescribed steps in order to reach spontaneity. (Follow all of these steps but then forget you ever followed them, because the important thing is to reach this state without trying.) On the other hand, joy and spontaneity in life? Seven steps seems like a rather small price to pay for that desirable outcome.

I couldn’t quite decide whether I was truly stressed or just busy, and I couldn’t decide whether I was lacking joy and spontaneity or, like most people, just have a few unsatisfied wishes and a few unmet goals. Then I received my “Word for the Day” email from an organization called A Network for Grateful Living. This isn’t really a word in the sense of a vocabulary word; it’s a quote. And on that particular day the quote was this: “O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.”

That’s by Henry David Thoreau. He did not use the word stress. He did not suggest seven steps. Just as he went to the woods to live deliberately, he made joy a simple thing too: “my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.” Somehow that quote told me I didn’t need seven steps, or a book, to find my joy. I just needed to remember these essential words from Thoreau: joy, the concept as well as the word itself, is to be found inside of enjoyment. Remembering to take pleasure in all we have, rather than stressing out about all we need to do, is the best stress-reliever we will ever find. No seven steps. No steps at all. Just remembering to be joyful is joy enough, and I was so glad to be reminded of these words at just that moment.

Workday inertia

Inertia is an amazingly powerful force, I’ve come to realize. Especially on me.

And more so now than ever, it seems. These days, unlike when the kids were really little and I was home with them, or the years following that when I was working in an office full-time, I spend my work days at home, at my kitchen table, writing. For six hours at a time. It’s the solitude and uninterrupted writing time I’ve craved for years, and now that I have it, I don’t care what the assignment is – I can be working on an article for the Globe, or writing about varicose veins for my client who runs a medical website, or studying up on football stats for the next segment I need to draft for my client who is compiling a book about pro football, or revising my own manuscript-in-progress yet again – it doesn’t matter what the topic, I’m grateful just to have the time to write.

Sometimes a little too grateful. I find it very hard to make myself get up and do anything else.

I know that mental stimulation is important during the work day even when I’m on deadline. I just have trouble sometimes overcoming the urge to just stay where I am and keep writing.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine here in town hosted a midmorning gathering. I was in the middle of a writing assignment, and it started to rain hard. “I should go to this get-together, but it’s so tempting to just stay put,” I said to a client who called to discuss an upcoming project. Since Carlisle is almost entirely a driving town rather than a walking town, there’s always the additional excuse that staying home is more environmentally sound than going anywhere.

“Just go. You’ll be glad you made the effort,” she replied.

I was puzzled. The client hardly knows me; she doesn’t know the host of the party or any of the other guests who would be there; and she wasn’t even close enough geographically to see how hard it was raining. Why was she so sure I should go?

But then I thought about the note I’d have to write apologizing if I didn’t show up, and how sheepish I’d feel next time I saw the host. And so I reminded myself it was less than a ten-minute drive to the party; I could stay for 40 minutes and not be away from my desk for more than an hour total.

Needless to say, it was the right decision. The house was full of cheerful, welcoming faces, hot coffee and fragrant baked goods. I caught up with friends I hadn’t seen since before summer vacation. I traded opinions on local issues and heard updates on the construction project at our school that I should have known about from the newspaper but hadn’t taken the time to follow closely.

Best of all, I didn’t have to write a sheepish apology attempting to excuse my absence.

Yesterday it wasn’t a social occasion that pulled me away from my desk but an unexpected offer from my father to drive me thirty minutes to the repair shop where my car was being fixed. I could have just waited until the end of the day and gotten a ride from Rick, as I’d planned to do. As before, the lure of sitting at my computer writing was almost irresistible.

But so was the chance to have a few minutes to visit alone with my father, and doing that particular drive in the midafternoon was a much better idea than waiting for rush hour. And so I shut down my computer and climbed into his car.

We had a great visit. Not for any particular reason – we talked about an issue related to town government, recent segments we’d heard on NPR, nothing weighty – but it was just good to get away from the silence of my workday and spend a little undistracted time with my father. On the way back, having picked up my car and said goodbye to him, I even prolonged the trip with a stop at the supermarket, taking advantage of the midafternoon lull there to enjoy empty aisles and no lines.

It’s good to be able to focus on work. I’m really grateful that my workday affords me such solitude, but I’m also glad that once in a while something compels me to overcome my inertia. Thoreau wrote that he had one chair for solitude, two for company, and three for society. It’s a useful image to keep in mind. The work day shouldn’t be all about that one chair. Even Thoreau, who moved to a cabin in the woods to live deliberately and in relative solitude, knew that once in a while he should really pull out those two other chairs.