Thursday, July 08, 2004

So...Leah's coming back from France tomorrow.
And I'm leaving for Baja at 6AM this Sunday!
I'll be gone from July 11-28. It's going to be mostly camping, and we're gonna go snorkeling, and whale watching, and hiking up volcanoes...I'm excited! But I'm also kind of nervous. I hope nothing bad happens, (ie someone dying of dehydration or getting attacked by a shark), and that everyone gets along alright!
So now, I will leave you with a (kind of long) quote from Steinbeck's Log from the Sea of Cortez (which is about the author's journey down to Baja California). I think this is a funny and interesting section about laziness:

“For in some beastly way this fine laziness has got itself a bad name. It is easy to see how it might have come into disrepute, if the result of laziness were hunger. But rarely is. Hunger makes laziness impossible. It has even become sinful to be lazy....
How can such a process have become a shame and a sin? Only in laziness can one achieve a state of contemplation which is a balancing of values, a weighting of oneself against the world and the world against itself. A busy man cannot find time for such balancing. We do not think a lazy man can commit murders, nor great thefts, nor lead a mob. He would be more likely to think about it and laugh. And a nation of lazy contemplative men would be incapable of fighting a war unless their very laziness were attacked. Wars are the activities of busy-ness.”