Chapter 1: The Picnic Table

John McPhee

I’ve been thinking about John McPhee lately. In case you don’t know, he is one of most venerated American essayists … Pulitzer prize, national book award nominations, staff writer at the New Yorker for over half a century … widely considered the master of longform literary non-fiction. 

In the summer of 1966, John was deep in one of the biggest writing projects of his early career … a book-length essay on the New Jersey Pine Barrens. It had taken eight months to finish the research. Just the research. It was, as he put it, “enough research to fill a silo.” And then  … daunted by its immensity … he spent two weeks, lying on a picnic table in his backyard staring into the branches of an ash tree wondering how the hell he was going to turn it into a coherent essay.

What strikes me about this story isn’t the fact that a great writer got writer’s block. Or the fact that after two weeks. (Two weeks!) he had an epiphany that led to one of the greatest American essays of the 20th century.  

What strikes me is that he stayed on the picnic table, waiting and thinking, thinking and waiting, without succumbing to the impulse to rush over to the typewriter and get busy.  

Why It Matters

I’ve been thinking about John McPhee, because I’ve been having my own picnic table moment … overwhelmed by the scale of what I’ve taken on in this podcast. Regular listeners will know that since February of this year, I have been writing, revising, recording, editing, and producing an I Heart This episode every week. What you may not know is that I’m also revising a novel, outlining another, and organizing a public event in November so big that we had to rent a theater. Other projects have been languishing on the back burner, including a couple of art/science performance pieces and a new YouTube channel. Thankfully, I just finished installing heat pumps in my house, so now … at least that’s off the table. But like everyone else, I’ve got all the everyday responsibilities of keeping my house from falling apart, caring for family and friends, getting regular exercise and enough sleep, doing my part to counteract the consolidation of power by an authoritarian president … and oh, yeah … I’ve also got a job. 

I know I’m not alone. Overwhelm is as common as dirt. But like with grief and falling in love, just because something is commonplace, doesn’t make it any more manageable when it happens to you. My overwhelm caught up with me last Wednesday night as I was trying to finish this episode before my midnight deadline. I had a 1700 word draft … and I might have recorded it … but I just couldn’t. In the maelstrom of everything I was doing, I had thrown together a slapdash essay with a tepid conclusion about balance that I didn’t really believe. It was, as Laura said, “just okay” … and she was right … and I knew it. 

With my deadline just hours away, nothing could save my draft. There was no time to lie on the picnic table. 

That story about John McPhee raised question that, no doubt, you’ve wrestled with too. How much work do we want to do? At what pace? How much is too much? How much latitude do we give ourselves to rest and think and dream?

Chapter 2: The Monk and the Dynamo

Our answers to these questions affect the quality of our lives, but also the quality of our work.  

The Dynamo

One of the voices in my heart, whom I’ll call the Dynamo, has a lot to say about this. The Dynamo wants to accomplish great things, to write poems and podcasts and science lessons that would make your jaw drop … to make beauty that the world has never seen. It cites over a century of research. (What, the voices in your heart don’t do citations? That’s funny. Mine always does.) Anyway, the research is convincing:  people who make immortal works of art and history-changing discoveries, are invariably people who just make a shit-ton of things. They’re not afraid to work and to sacrifice. Apparently, quality is a consequence of quantity. 

Partly it’s just the law of large numbers. If you write a hundred books, you have a much better chance that one of them will delight your readers than if you just write two or three. But partly, it’s about honing your craft. The Beatles played seven-hour sets at dives in Hamburg’s red-light district for nearly two-and-a-half years. It was grueling, but when they returned to Liverpool, they had an encyclopedic repertoire and were masters at commanding an audience’s attention. Or how about the Vlogbrothers making two video essays a week since the beginning of YouTube. As the Nobel-winning chemist, Linus Pauling said about the secrets to scientific insight. “Well, you just have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones.”

It was with this in mind that last February, I committed to the one episode per week pace. A pace that has sharpened my eye for good stories, helped me experiment with a variety of structures, and forced me to quickly cut to the emotional core of an idea. 

The Monk

But there is another voice in my heart that vociferously argues against the Dynamo. I call it the Monk. And the Monk says, “Life isn’t about what you do, Ben … it’s about who you’re going to be.” And all this doing will get in the way of being. As far as the Monk is concerned, “how much work do I want to do” and “at what pace” are the wrong questions. 

And the Monk makes convincing points. One is that the logical consequence of “quality is a function of quantity” is workaholism. Danielle Steele might be the fourth best-selling fiction author of all time because she’s written almost 200 books … but do you really want to be like her? … chained to her computer every day from dawn till dusk, skipping holidays, and subsisting on toast. (Seriously, that’s how she does it. Even now that she’s 70-something.) And my answer is definitely, “No.” I’d rather give up writing altogether. 

But the Monk says, this isn’t just about quality of life; it’s also about the quality of work. Filling your life up with activity, erodes your ability to do any of it well. Not only does it dilute your effort, but the psychic load of tracking so many projects clouds your concentration. You get overloaded, exactly like I did on Wednesday night. 

For the Monk, ‘doing more’ eventually gets in the way of the work itself. Like the rock star who instead of glorying in the living dream of his first world tour, gets sullen and grouchy at journalists and fans alike … because the pace of it is grueling, the performance never stops, and he has no space to do the thing he loves most, which is actually write music. 

Chapter Three: The Wisdom of No Escape

In my life, I have loved both the Monk and the Dynamo. 

When I was a kid, my greatest hero was John Muir, the vagabond poet of wild places. Like him, I ached to wander, free and aimless, through the wild. And in my own small way, I did. In my twenties, I spent whole days sitting in the woods, watching birds and tracking bears, while my peers were starting careers. Sometimes, I’d just study the lichens on an old stump for an hour. Sometimes, I would just let my attention drift from leaf to cloud to sky. I didn’t write much in those days … maybe an occasional poem … but only when the words bubbled up and spilled over and I couldn’t contain them anymore. It wasn’t a practice. It was a reflex. But some of those poems are among my life’s best. I dare not revise a word, lest I disturb their perfection. 

My thirties were different. I learned to chase dreams with passion … to push myself through the last miles of a marathon and find that I could do it after all. I worked all day at school and wrote with the discipline of a soldier after the kids were finally asleep … only to discover one Christmas Eve, exactly at midnight, that I … me … Ben Lord … had finished a novel. I will never forget the profound joy that settled over me that night. I didn’t always love the intensity of the work, but I often did. And I also loved the fruits of the labor … carefully crafted lessons that made students literally gasp with understanding … having my writing noticed by magazines who offered to pay me for it. Being invited to work as a consultant for school districts across the country. In my twenties, I’d been embarrassed by my ambitions. In my thirties, I loved them, unashamed. 

If I was forced to pick between the Monk and the Dynamo, I don’t know which I would choose. I know in my bones that both can lead to beautiful work and a beautiful life. 

That’s where I was last Wednesday night … filling my life with activity while simultaneously expecting the insight that comes from quiet reflection … trying to do all the things and still have time to reflect … trying not to choose. 

By the time Friday morning came around, I’d written my way through another aborted draft. My episode was a day and a half overdue. In trying to sacrifice nothing, I’d given up both the joys of the Dynamo and the joys of the Monk. As I stood in the shower, it occurred to me … there was no way out. I could write an episode every week or I could write episodes I was proud of every time … But I couldn’t have both. Choice was non-negotiable. 

The Monk would call this the wisdom of no escape. 

Chapter Four: Archimedes Bath

A ten minutes drive from where I live is Naulaka, the house where Rudyard Kipling lived when he wrote The Jungle Book. Kipling’s time at Naulaka was one of the most productive of his life … but he only wrote for four hours a day. 

Ben Franklin was an inveterate workaholic who would’ve fit right into today’s hustle culture. But the work that made him a household name, both in his time and ours, only happened after he gave up on aggressively growing his printing business and turned its management over to a partner. This eighteenth-century-style early retirement was the thing that gave him the latitude to experiment with the little-understood phenomenon of electricity.Einstein took a job as a patent clerk, he said, because it was easy. He could get his work done in a few hours and spend the rest of his workday daydreaming about what it would be like to ride side-saddle on a beam of light. Daydreams that changed the nature of reality itself. Virginia Woolf, Charles Darwin, Alice Munro, Stephen King, Charles Dickens, Henri Poincare, Igor Stravinski, Jean-Paul Sartre. The list of visionaries who changed the course of history and art on three or four hours of focused work each day is long. 

These people were all undoubtedly Dynamos, pouring themselves into the great work that they knew mattered. But they were also Monks. They knew that stepping back was crucial. They knew that lying on their backs on the picnic table was actually part of the hustle. 

I think I imagined that having a balance between the Monk and the Dynamo would bring a sense of ease. But for many of these heroes, that wasn’t the case. There was no resolution to the tension between the Monk and the Dynamo. John McPhee felt it particularly acutely.  

Anyone who’s stepped on a tightrope can tell you that balance is dynamic, made of constant, tiny adjustments … and the more daring the tightrope we walk, the harder that adjustment becomes. 

But perhaps it is in the tension itself where the genius resides. You push yourself through a silo-full of research. Then the problem becomes intractable. And all you can do is wait. No one can tell you when to get up from the table and write. No one can tell you when to put down the pen and go for a walk. If you want to do the great work, you’ve got to walk the tightrope. Readjusting the Dynamo and the Monk with every step. Because, in the end, doing and being can’t be separated. We can’t do without being. We can’t be without doing. Do-be-do-be do. 

I fell off the tightrope this week. It compromised both the quality of my work and the quality of my life. But it wasn’t so bad. I had a good net, and I learned a few things. I fell too far to the Dynamo side. I’d filled my time to the brim … so much that I wasn’t able to hear the Monk whispering for me to stop. 

So here I am getting back on the tightrope. With a new voice in my heart. It’s the voice of John McPhee … reminding me that our work … and our lives… have rhythms. Fast then slow then fast again. Right now, I’ve got to slow down. So, I’ve decided to step back from weekly episodes. Perhaps I’ll write every other week for a while. In November, I Heart This’s third season will come to an end. And then … I don’t know … Maybe I’ll come back for a fourth season in February … Maybe I’ll turn instead to projects languishing on my desk … Maybe… like poetry did in my twenties … I’ll just wait until “I Heart This” essays bubble up from within on their own syncopated schedule. It’s been a long run, and I’m proud of the work I’ve done here. But maybe it’s time for something new. 

This weekend, I’m going on a writer’s retreat by the coast … I’ll walk in the woods … watch some birds, track some bears … and when I come back … I think I’ll lie down on my own backyard picnic table beneath the branches of the Norway maple, and wait until I know for sure.