No urge to be doing

I used a quote from Patrick O’Brian’s Post Captain to start my letter, “No urge to be doing”: “There are days… when one sees as though one had been blind the rest of one’s life. Such clarity – perfection in everything, not merely in the extraordinary. One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good. However… doing of some kind there must be.” I am still in the kind of emotional and spiritual fallout that happens after I release a book, well-described by bell hooks in Teaching To Transgress: Whenever I finish a work, I always feel lost, as though a steady anchor has been taken away and there is no sure ground under my feet. During the time between ending one project and beginning another, I always have a crisis of meaning. I begin to wonder what my life is all about and what I have been put on this earth to do. It is as though immersed in a project I lose all sense of myself and must then, when the work is done, rediscover…