Seriously.

These days when friends and family ask what's new, I've stopped saying "Busy." It's like answering "Fine, and you?" It doesn't say anything new. Everyone's busy, we're always busy. Deadlines come fast and heedless of our mood. Some days, weeks, and even years are remorseless as the Furies. Projects don't ask us how we're feeling, the e-mail inbox doesn't stop filling when we're low or blue or angry as hell that people we loved though we barely knew them are out there, clutching to life in a hospital, battling infections and struggling to open their eyes, or out there even further, dead before their time. Busyness propels us, and that is its merit, and that is its curse.

Over Spring Break, like most faculty and students, I tasted something I hadn't in a while, and it was comforting and sweet. Time. Just a moment of time, time to do nothing. Time to dangle thoughts over the side of the dock, to breathe in to a count of 8 and out to a count of 16. I double-dug a raised-bed garden, worked the compost, planted sweet peas and leafy greens, things that can survive any frost April might still have left.

There wasn't a lot of it, this time of which I speak. But there it was, briefly, enough to take a taste.

I love a poem by Emerson called "Days," in which Days are personified as "daughters of Time," "marching single in an endless file." Each Day has the power to grant wishes to every person, and those wishes are there simply for the asking: "Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all." You can take all you want. The speaker of Emerson's poem, however, gets stuck staring at the endless procession of Days and in his haste and bafflement takes only "a few herbs and apples." The poem ends with his catching a glimpse of the Day's face, which is scornful. The Day scorns him, the poem is clear, for not taking more of what it had to offer.

Maybe what that poem means is that it's good to be busy, because busyness takes everything from the Day's pockets and purse, and sweeps at the corners of the Day's house to get it all. Instead, I think the poem means that it's better to throw one's legs or thoughts or projects over the side of the dock once in a while, because maybe busyness is what hurried Emerson's speaker to take only herbs and apples, when instead he might have had everything this side of the moon. Busyness, after all, is what leads one to see only the procession of days, not to see each individual day for what it has to give.

The last time I literally dangled my legs in the water was last summer in Scotland, on the bonnie banks of Loch Lomond. That day, my friends and I drove up into the Arrochar Range towards Inverary and stopped above the most beautiful valley I have ever seen, a place called "Rest and Be Thankful." We rested. We were thankful. I cupped my hands and drank straight from the mountain spring, counting in-breaths to 8 and out-breaths to 16. There was no busyness there. I remember thinking, and maybe I said it aloud: "this is where we go when we die." There is one long day there, wherever it is we imagine the dead to go, beyond the hum of busyness, beyond the procession of days, where one takes every last gift that Day has to offer, where they rest, and we rest, and are thankful.