It is another hot day in a season of record hot days. Tom and I are at home, the electric fans spin and turn and click, the curtains flap wildly, then listlessly, as the wind dies. We are baking, slowly. It is a time for reflection because busyness is out of the question.

But busyness has been a particular preoccupation for human beings since at least the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. People seem a little lost in the chase for something to fill any time when there is not something to be done. The boredom I experienced as a child is disappearing, a shame really, because we can better appreciate activity when we measure it against an absence of it. Technology has only speeded this process, so that the mental clothes that were once hand-washed and dried are now spun at huge and variable speeds in a centrifuge. I suppose I am no better, finding a retreat in activities that I have chosen ( and thus conferred legitimacy upon), compared with the tabloid immersions of other people. It is an unfair comparison.

Recently I bought a kindle e-book written by the haiku poet Matsuo Basho, this one tracing his final journey on Honshu (Narrow Road to the Interior). I have only just finished the excellent foreword and I can think of no better way of spending a sweaty day. Basho was heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism and so his life gradually became one with his beliefs, though he was never a monk. In the first paragraph of this travel diary we find the beautifully arresting, "Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home." I hope to get my mind around this as I read further, though I suspect that there is less to do, and more to be.