Profound thought for the Task
Do not give all of your attention away. Focus on what you’re doing, but feel the inner body at the same time whenever possible.
– Eckhart Tolle
The task: Go to the woods and find a nice stick.
Ok. Quite a easy task by all accounts, but the weather today is changeable, and where are ‘the woods’? Living by the coast in Worthing, all our green spaces are Northish from here. There are trees in the town, but nothing you could really call a wood, so I’m going to have to travel to the woods. My favourite woods are at Kingley Vale, but they are 20 miles away, and seem a long way to go for a nice stick. There are some ‘proper’ woods on the outskirts of town I could get to I suppose. I’d like to use my bicycle because that combines physical effort with task management.
I look at the skies and there are a lot of thick grey clouds scudding in amongst patches of blue. It is quite windy today, so the ride northish is going to test my physical effort, but the ride back should be rewarding. So I ride to the woods at Highdown Hill, where I’m met with an impressive hail storm, but I shelter by the entrance to the ornamental gardens until it blows over. The walk up the hill to the wood is invigorating. There’s no-one else about at this time of day/year/weather but the view from the top of the hill is amazing. You can track where the various hailstorms are, and the landscape and seascape is a patchwork of strong sun beams and dark cloud and misty rain.
It looks like the next hailstorm will be with me in a few minutes, so I make my way quickly to ‘the wood’, which I imagine will give me some sort of protection. The wood is all deciduous trees and none of them are yet in leaf, so it will offer some respite from the wind and hail and rain, I suppose. Anyway, I’m now searching for a ‘nice’ stick, so my head is down, scanning the ground for something that fits that description.
What makes a stick a nice stick? The age-old decision to make. There are a very great many sticks round these parts. By the looks, most of them have recently broken and fallen off the trees over winter. Others have been lying here a bit longer and are covered in moss, fungi, or decaying. If I were to think of an ideal nice stick, it would have to be gnarled, and with interesting markings or patterns. Strong, and about the length of a staff. Perhaps something Gandalf would hold onto. I don’t see anything like that here though.
I like the sticks covered in moss though. I pick a few up but they are so decayed that they just fall apart. A bit more walking and it doesn’t take me long though to find a bit of moss covered wood that looks promising. I pick up a nice looking stick – but is it a stick? Another conundrum – when is a stick not a stick? How thick can a stick be before it becomes a branch, or a log? I’m not going to google it because at that moment there’s another huge wind blowing through the canopies above, heralding the next hailstorm. So this stick – my nice stick – is the stick I want to take back home. It’s half a metre long and quite thick, but it’s got some lovely moss growing on it, and some interesting patterns on the bark. It’s almost not a stick by definition, but it is a nice stick to me, and that’s all that matters at this moment.
I could spend another half hour or so walking through the wood looking for other stick contenders, but I really don’t think I’ll find any. Not in this wood, on this day, in this weather. So I pull up my hood and traipse back to my bike to journey home. Task done.
Do not give all of your sticks away. Focus on what you’re searching for, but feel the woody body at the same time whenever possible.
