28 December

I'm fascinated by the desperate need many people feel to always be doing something. Not just at work, but even in holidays. Some of it is just having new experiences, no doubt, but there's a lot of it that feels like desperation - if you just do nothing for a while, you're confronted with yourself and your feelings, or you may even have to take stock of a situation and think "what's really happening here?" And people don't always want to go there. Boredom seems often to be about the uncomfortable knowing of yourself and your work and life. Travel can be like that too, the desperation to go to the next new place, always on the move and never really living with any sort of presence, anywhere. We lay waste to our own places and then go looking for somebody else's to spoil. It's probably one of the defining features of our culture, this endless search for distraction and inability to just be.