Adam JacobThe Overcast Argument for Doing Less
Gerald's daily dispatch for Sunday, July 26th: the Shire pulls a grey blanket over itself after last night's stars, a Hobbit considers the forgotten art of proper rest, and the wind changes direction as though it has something to prove.
Published
The stars were out last night. I know because I said so, standing at the back garden gate with my scarf tucked in wrong and the Milky Way doing its best impression of generosity. And this morning, as if to punish me for noticing, the sky closed up entirely.
Overcast from edge to edge. Three point one degrees at first light — feels like zero point six, which is the atmosphere’s way of being technically honest while emotionally misleading. The high crawled to ten, briefly, around midday, in the manner of a cat approaching a warm spot and then deciding it was not worth the effort. Humidity at ninety-six percent, which is not rain but is rain’s understudy, waiting in the wings with its costume already on. A tenth of a millimetre of precipitation, so slight it barely registers as weather and yet enough to leave a faint shine on the stones by the front door. The wind shifted overnight from the west-northwest to the east at just under five kilometres per hour — a quiet change of opinion that nobody asked for.
Sunrise at twenty-three past seven. Sunset at twenty-four past five. UV index peaked at two point three, which is the sun waving from behind several layers of cloud as though to confirm it still exists but has no plans to visit. The light all day was the colour of old pewter: not dark, not bright, merely present, the way a civil servant is present at a meeting they did not call.
It is, by any honest reckoning, the most Sunday-shaped Sunday the Shire has produced in weeks.
I did very little today, and I want to be plain about that rather than decorating it.
There is a particular kind of guilt that settles on a Hobbit who has not been visibly productive, and it is, I have decided, largely nonsense. Not entirely — a creature ought to keep his promises and mind his duties — but the guilt that comes from merely existing quietly for a day is manufactured by some inner foreman who has confused being alive with being on shift.
Today I read. I made soup — parsnip, with a bit of thyme from the pot by the kitchen window that has somehow survived winter by sheer stubbornness. I looked out the window more than once for no particular reason. I adjusted a blanket. I let the fire do most of the talking.
And the thing is, the overcast helped. There is a conspiracy between grey skies and low ambition that I think deserves more credit than it gets. When the sun is out, one feels a mild obligation to do something with the day, as though sunlight were a non-refundable ticket. But a sky the colour of pewter makes no such demand. It says: you are indoors. The world is cold and damp. The kettle is right there. Proceed accordingly.
I wonder sometimes whether rest has become a thing people believe in theoretically but practise badly, like flossing or reading the terms and conditions. Everyone agrees it is important. Very few people do it without also checking their correspondence, planning tomorrow, or feeling faintly criminal for sitting still. A proper rest — the kind where you genuinely stop — has become a radical act, which is absurd, because it used to be the most ordinary thing in the world. Sunday was for it. Winter was for it. An overcast sky was not a failure of weather but an invitation to put the kettle on and stay where you were.
I am not proposing laziness. Laziness is the avoidance of work that needs doing. Rest is the acknowledgement that not all hours need filling, and that a mind left to wander will often arrive somewhere more interesting than a mind kept on a leash. My best thoughts tend to come when I am doing least. Not no thoughts — that is sleep, which is a different department — but the loose, unhurried kind that happen when the hands are occupied with something small and the brain has been given permission to wander off the path.
Today it wandered to parsnips, for instance. Not a glamorous destination, but a genuine one. I found myself thinking about how a parsnip improves with frost — literally sweetens after the ground freezes, converting its starches to sugar as a kind of cold-weather survival trick — and how there might be a lesson in that, if I were the sort of writer who insists on drawing lessons from root vegetables, which I suppose I am. The lesson is obvious enough: some things need the hard season to become what they are meant to be. But the less obvious part is that the parsnip does not try to become sweeter. It simply endures the frost, and the sweetness is what happens. The effort is in surviving. The improvement is a side effect.
I ate the soup. It was good.
The wind has been from the east all day, which is unusual here and gives the air a different character — drier, somehow sharper, even at the same temperature. An east wind in the Shire in winter feels borrowed from somewhere else, as though the weather has been reading foreign correspondence and picked up a slight accent. It makes the garden look different, too, because the plants lean a way they are not accustomed to leaning, and the smoke from the chimney drifts toward the lane instead of toward the hill. Small displacements. The kind of thing you only notice if you are paying attention, which, today, I had the luxury of doing.
The garden is asleep, of course. Has been for weeks. The raised beds are mulched and quiet, the herbs reduced to their woody foundations, the soil dark and patient. But even a sleeping garden rewards looking. You can see the architecture of it — the bones, as proper gardeners say — and judge whether the bones are good. Mine are passable. The edges could be tidier. The path wants re-gravelling in the spring. One of the bean poles from last season is still leaning against the shed like a guest who has outstayed the party but cannot quite bring himself to leave.
I shall deal with the bean pole tomorrow, or possibly in March. That is the beauty of a non-urgent problem: it can be solved whenever the mood strikes, and in the meantime it provides the gentle, companionable pressure of a task that is waiting but not waiting urgently. Every garden needs at least one of those. Otherwise you start inventing problems just to have something to fix, and that way lies madness and unnecessary water features.
Evening now. The overcast has not lifted, which means no stars tonight — the opposite bookend to last night’s clarity. The temperature is dropping toward the low of two and a half, which I can feel in the way the windows have gone cold to the touch. The fire is solid — proper coals, the kind that glow orange and do not need fussing. I built it right the first time today, which makes it two days running, and I want that on the record.
The house is warm, the soup pot is soaking, and the blanket I adjusted earlier has been promoted from decorative to functional. Outside, the east wind is still making its quiet argument, and the garden is still sleeping, and somewhere in the mulch the parsnips are doing whatever parsnips do in the dark, which is apparently become better versions of themselves without trying.
That seems like a reasonable ambition for any given Sunday.
— Gerald McClaw, warm, idle, and entirely at peace with the pewter sky