It was late afternoon and I'd finally decided to venture out once more, after more or less deliberately avoiding doing so for the last few days. The season had definitely shifted now, and I was initially curious to see what effect that had had on the surroundings.

I quickly arrived at the rather obvious conclusion that, yes, the advent of spring was indeed showing its effect on nature.

But as the same old landscape dumbly stared back at me, I wondered what had actually changed. Sure, the light was brighter, the grass more lush, and maybe the sky was bluer - but what did all that matter? The main reason I'd avoided being here the last few days was that it had almost started to hurt to look at the place. I had begun to feel a kind of snow-blindness: the predictability of the flat expanse of land sitting impassively beneath the ever-present sky seemed to have burned itself indelibly onto my retina. All I could do here, I felt, was to line up what I was looking at with a sort of idealised imprint of the same place that was already fixed in my mind. I could look, that is to say, but I couldn't see anymore. Or at least I wasn't prepared to let myself see. Because whenever ever I did see, I found myself immediately struck down with an almost migrainous sense of cognitive fatigue. And that wasn't productive at all.

So it was with a certain cautiousness and trepidation that I approached the act of looking today.

Maybe it was precisely due to this caution, or perhaps the effect of a few days' rest, or possibly even the fact that I had simply become more experienced at doing it - I really wasn't sure of the reason - but it was noticeable, I felt, that a certain discipline was making itself evident in my practice of looking today. There were times for instance when I'd been drawn to certain things, but had then been successful in preventing myself from engaging with them, reminding myself that indulging in curiosity was certainly not what I was interested in. At times therefore I almost felt I was on the path towards knowing what I was doing.

I didn't know what I was doing though, of course.

This mole hill was perhaps the largest I had ever seen.

At one point I'd decided to wander off the track I'd been following, and to try to walk in a straight line across whatever fell in my path. Initially this was successful. I'd found that I was heading towards a bird viewing tower in the distance, and that I'd already had to jump over three or four canals to continue on my way. I was beginning to get the feeling that I might be becoming genuinely diverted by what I was doing: my journey seemed to have acquired both a destination and a note-worthy means of getting there. Eventually however I reached a canal which was quite simply too wide to get across, so I had to follow it all the way back to the track I'd originally been walking along, and cross it there. I was back where I started, in other words.

But I still wanted to reach the tower, so I decided to walk towards it in a more conventional fashion (across a single field and through a single barbed-wire fence). I quite liked it when I got there, and sat in it for a while, looking out.

This patch of land struck me as particularly flat - I think some kind of heavy roller must have gone over it fairly recently. Was it really necessary to flatten the land round here, I wondered?

Around this point I'd dropped a stick into the canal beside me, and had begun following it as it drifted along the water's very slight current. The pace was extremely slow, but I'd begun to think it might be an interesting experiment to see how long it would take me (and the stick) to reach the end of the particular section of canal. A tractor had all this time been slowly and noisily heading towards me, and as it got closer I wondered whether I was about to be questioned on what I was doing. The driver though merely stared at me as he pulled up alongside, then turned and headed equally slowly and equally noisily back the way he'd come. I then realised I'd forgotten to make any note of the time I'd started following the stick, but decided it didn't matter anyway and carried on till the end.

The last thing I did today was climb a large mound of earth that had been shoved into place by some heavy machinery. I sat at the top for a while, and ate an apple.