This is my brain on ship week

Our daily lives consist of work and human connection. Even when we're not doing one of those two things, we're trying to do them or thinking about them or worrying about them or feeling pleased about them.

During the day, I work and I communicate. Reading, typing, talking, fixing, disseminating, running into old friends in the street, assessing strangers from behind sunglasses. When my brain kicks into overdrive at bedtime, I'm either going over work in my head or anticipating it, or I'm thinking about my relationships and where they are and where they're going, including the ones that don't exist yet. Sometimes it all melds into an impossibly tangled panorama called dreams.

My dreams are often long, colorful, shot in widescreen format, full of people I haven't seen in years or never knew very well. Childhood friends whose real faces I'm not sure I could pick out of a lineup. Or entire work days, totally banal and so realistic that I feel like I haven't slept when it's time to get up and start all over. Nightmares are always anticipation, too—nothing bad ever happens, but I know with complete clarity that it will. It's just a matter of waiting.

When I run, I tell myself I need to stay healthy because of the energy my life requires, because I have to be able to take care of friends and family and children, of everything on my desk and in my house. Also because of how lucky I am that my body has the strength to run in the first place. Don't fool yourself, exercise is work. It's also meditation, but meditation is work.

When I take photographs, it's a matter of capturing that moment so I can share it. Also for the pleasure of preserving it, because otherwise it's only ether. Then I wind the film and stop at the photo place on the way to the office, get it developed and pay for the prints and scan them, post them and comment on them and show them to people who care because the images came from me, or are of them, often both.

When a flight is about to take off, I hope it won't crash in a big fiery ball, because I have so much left to do and so many people to know better.

It's not that I mind either of these two reasons for operating. I actually love most of it, most of the time—feeling useful and productive, feeling connected. But it's also essential to remind myself that not every moment and action has to be in service of something or someone, including myself.

It's all very well to take a picture or record a word for its greater utility, but sometimes it's best just to sit on the couch and not worry about it. It doesn't all have to get done, and sometimes the meaning gets lost in the doing. Sometimes empty is best.