Although I tell myself the writing in here is low stress and just for fun, three essays a week is still a whole lot, and I’ve been feeling for a little while like I’m running on fumes.

To be deeply lazy is to be truly settled. Mainly, it is to eliminate the distance between your ideal and your actual self. It is not so much about relaxation or effort as it is about the absence of internal conflict.

And maintaining this equilibrium isn’t just for my own sake. I want myself to be the most important thing so it can also, simultaneously and paradoxically, become the least important thing.

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You are beloved and worthy of rest because you are human, not a robot. ​ I know it’s hokey, but I’m trying to learn something from exercise science when it comes to thinking of rest as work, as essential as any workout. ​ I’m doing it because I need to start January in a place where I’m ready to (co)write a book, but also because I’ve worked nearly non-stop for the last year, and it’s time to rest.

I think that’s what a hobby is supposed to feel like: not an obligation, but a state you’re always returning to. It doesn’t have to be expensive, it doesn’t have to be organized, it doesn’t have to depend on other people. It just has to be yours.

What I’d like to write on it, I’m not exactly sure. Maybe something like this: It’s ok to rest, to explore, to experiment, to fail. It’s ok to have agenda-free downtime, even if it’s scary. It’s ok to wander around, even if you’re clear on how you’d like to be of service to the world. It’s ok to decompress, to not know and to just play with what comes up, as a beginner. It’s ok to frustrate yourself, to feel lost in space as there’s no sense off feedback or validation for doing nothing. Maybe it’s ok that I can just trust what’s coming up within me is good enough.

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves. ​ Her purpose in this project is to bring to the attention of the whole community, art that exists in its own context, ​ The artist creates a structure — whether that’s a map or a cordoned-off area — that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit and familiarity that constantly threaten to close it. ​ Actually, I’ve always found it weird that it’s called birdwatching, because half if not more of birdwatching is actually birdlistening. I personally think they should just rename it birdnoticing. ​ That ended up being two years. I recently asked him how he spent that time, and his answer was that he read a lot, rode his bike, studied math ​ In nature, things that grow unchecked are often parasitic or cancerous. And yet, we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Indeed our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

But really I work not because it's super-happy-fun-time each and every time I turn on my computer, but because if I do a bit of work first, then I have the freedom to not work later.

At 8:30am, my phone pinged. There are six of us on a text chain about local mountain lions, road closures, and which house we’re walking to for afternoon beers. This morning, there was an accident on the Pacific Coast Highway somewhere between Malibu and Santa Monica delaying commuters by a whopping two hours. I texted an old coworker with the details, knowing she would be caught in the traffic.

Lately I’ve been feeling sort of exhausted by the familiar dance of idea propagation that manifests over coffees, dinners, Twitter, and parties in my corner of the world. A late friend and gifted programmer once told me his most creative days were spent working in a bookstore. The work wasn’t challenging, but it was meditative, and it gave him space to let his mind wander. Sometimes it feels like I can’t think in here, because people are constantly asking me to externalize my thoughts all the time. I’m not ready to externalize everything I think about. Sometimes it takes years for me to articulate what I’m trying to say. (It took me several months to figure out how to write this post, for example.) While I think my writing has gotten sharper over the years, I also can’t help but feel it’s gotten worse somehow: invoking the things I hear other people say, instead of the things I happened across in dreams, hazy days that slip away at the park, or reading some dumb fiction I found from a free box that I picked up on the side of the road. I’m not sure it’s that I want to disappear from the internet, but just to get some distance between me and the existential “publish or perish” treadmill of mining each others’ brains for pithy insights that fit into 280 characters. Mediocrity is about making an active choice to say “screw it, good enough”: the decision to keep moving forward instead of trying to get that last 10%. At first, I rationalized doing basic (and while I’m at it, degenerate) things as a form of active mental recovery. As one friend phrased it, it’s cross-training your brain to balance out the hypertrophy elsewhere. The irony has not been lost on me that I’ve written a blog post about thinking less.

What would happen if I let myself take a break, let myself rest, gave myself some time off from the checklists and the to-do lists and the need to publicly appear productive? Maybe I’ll lose some followers, maybe I won’t be first in people’s minds when they’re thinking of someone to speak at their conference, maybe I’ll stop getting put into random lists of “Cool Thought Leaders To Follow On Twitter Dot Com.” But I’m not going to lose my job or my apartment or stop being able to pay my bills if I give myself a break from “trying to be productive literally every single day.” Realistically, I’m pretty sure I’ll still be able to find things like speaking opportunities if I want them. I’m not going to disappear if I put down my armor and let myself relax for a little while.

There is an almost mystical element to this search for a quick fix; it is rooted in the same misguided beliefs that once led Ponce de Léon to search for a “fountain of youth” upon landing in the so-called New World, scouring the ponds, rivers, lagoons, and lakes of the Florida coastline for the mythic fountain. (There’s debate about whether this actually happened, or if the quest is itself a myth — but the myth’s endurance tells us about its staying power.) The fountain of youth would be the ultimate recharge — a reversal of time in a single instant. The contemporary recharge is about continuously undoing the day before, quickly erasing the wear and tear of living, creating a fresh start or a blank slate or a best self. But it’s aimed at a singular objective: productivity. At its heart, the myth of the recharge is about turning away from what might be broken about the structure of our society — the constancy of work, the absence of affordable healthcare, the expectation that we will be “plugged in” or “online” 24 hours a day — in search of short-term, generalizable solutions. We do not ask ourselves whether all this might be untenable, but instead what supplement we might take to make it a little more bearable. We rise and grind and rise and grind and sleep in between. We deplete, recharge, deplete, recharge.

Sitting around drinking coffee and reading books and scribbling notes to myself.

and exercise and yoga and turning off devices and caffeine and pep talks—these can all help with our metaphorical recharge, but they’re not a perfect formula like a plug into a correctly-shaped hole. Sometimes are bodies and minds are stubborn mysteries. I have been thinking lately, as usual, our language about wellness is bending toward the language of machines. the one and only infallible, deep-in-the-bones, rejuvenating source of energy, has been the love of good people. the warmth of friends I haven’t seen in a year, and who have lit my face up with a grin so expansive that I find my cheeks sore at the end of the day.

Fascination in the Kaplan’s sense is a magical (that’s my word) quality of an environment where your attention is held but not drained.

and of course, my mother is upset at me for not having sent her any yet to begin the ritual of unpacking, to return to my old habits and objects and find all of them a little richer from the time spent away. My to-do list is very long right now, and I’ll be spending the rest of this Sunday in my inbox. But I am so much happier than I was this time last week — my legs more tired and my head less fogged.