My alarm clock has a large brown nose. It’s wet, and connected to that nose is a long face. A whole head, actually. Two eyes with bushy brows. And hot breath. And this alarm clock? She’s just the height of my bed.

She’s not a buzzing alarm clock, but produces instead a soft whine. Not impolite, but it’s also not a hey, hate to bother you kind of whine either. It’s more of an exchange of data. She’s letting me know, EEEEEK! I see the sun and that means walk!

And so I stretch until it feels like my legs could possibly remove themselves from my hips, and I roll out of bed. And this is how the poodle and I begin our experiments in walking. In many ways, the poodle taught me HOW to walk. Because originally, I thought walking was just about moving my feet, one at a time, to cover a distance. I thought there was a goal. And originally, there was. It was one mile. Modest. Foolish, even, to think I had any say in the matter. And then the poodle let me know that one mile would simply not suffice for her data collection dreams.

Two miles every morning was her methodology, and since she needs a human attached to the other end of her leash, here I am. This is my methodology now, too. And at first, I am reluctant. Every morning, reluctant. My bed was soft. My limbs were in all the right places, perfect comfort. Outside? The Florida air is damp, and the pavement is hard, and I have to put on SOCKS. But then there’s a breeze. And a lizard. Lots of lizards, actually. And I start to wake up and see what the poodle sees.

Taunting squirrels. A new family of finches. Before I know it, I have downloaded an app to identify bird calls. I began COLLECTING bird calls. For all my life, I thought the sound of a mourning dove was an owl. But now look at me. Experienced in bird sounds. Is this my mic drop moment?

There’s more, too, because I am always reading, and so often during these walks, I split my time between the inner thoughts of my head and the general grounding feeling of walking the Earth. In my head, my thoughts will wander to bigger messages in what I’m reading. And right now, that theme is utility.

My daughter recently finished Klara and the Sun, and I read Never Let Me Go, both by Kazuo Ishiguro. And so we traversed to the theater to watch Klara and the Sun so that she could enjoy being a tweenager and expressing how much better the book was. (The movie was still good, and I cried, of course.) But the point is this. Ishiguro has a lot to say about utility.

For Klara, an “artificial friend,” her utility, or her function, is human companionship. For Kathy, the main character in Never Let Me Go, her function as a human clone is to serve first as a carer and then as an organ donor. Her biological purpose is to donate until “completion.” Completion, by the way, is death, which the gory geek in me loves and can’t help but connect to The Giving Tree (Silverstein).

Anyway.

In these works, we see how humans have created clones and robots with very specific functions. We know exactly why they exist. What they were designed to do. What they are supposed to provide. But what we don’t see is the function of the HUMAN BEINGS themselves. Because that’s a much harder question, isn’t it?

What IS the function of a human being? And do we even need one? I suppose if we did have a function, it would be nice if doing it made us happy. Some sort of biological incentive. A reward for doing what we’re supposed to do.

For me, the immediate answer to my function is my favorite verb: create. And it does feel like, in much of life, our function is to produce some THING. To create. After all, I find happiness when I create something. And I don’t mean just physical things, like when I’m painting or doing a killer job organizing the junk drawer. Even when I produce a sentence, it feels good. A thought. A connection between two seemingly unrelated ideas. Memories, too (Is that a reproduction? I don’t know). But there’s something deeply satisfying about making something that wasn’t there before. Even if that something is just an understanding.

The thing is, though, our society has taken this inclination to create and stuffed its mouth full of GOALS.

Financial goals, mostly. Numeric. Data. Because it’s not enough to simply live. We have this man-made concept of money, and without getting into the infuriating details of capitalism, money sucks the life out of creating. It taints the recipe of creation.

And somewhere in there, the act of creating, which once felt so satisfying on its own, becomes tangled up with what it can earn.

Because we don’t just paint. We wonder if we could sell our paintings. We don’t just write. We wonder if anyone will read it, buy it. How many books are in the series? How many words? How large is your existing audience? Don’t you have a marketing plan? What’s your social media presence like?

We don’t even WALK. We track our steps, measure our heart rates, and congratulate ourselves for burning calories. My least favorite part of the day is when my watch congratulates me for hitting my activity goal after I have sneezed, or, when I finally sit down to watch a show, it tells me to stand up again, dammit. Don’t I care about my DATA?

Even rest has the eventual goal of productivity. We’re told to rest so that we can return to work refreshed and accomplish more. Maybe you just need a break. But not too long of a break, of course, and what do you mean when you walk the dog you like to stop and stare at the clouds? Doesn’t that affect your walk time goal?

Why isn’t the experience of simply living enough for us?

My algorithm has a shit ton of puppies, recipes, slime recipes for my kid, and (currently) Ethan Hawke interviews because somehow Meta figured out my girlhood crush (obviously this was after my Raphael from TMNT days). But honestly, who doesn’t have a crush on Ethan Hawke? Would I ever have gotten into philosophy if it hadn’t been for Reality Bites? Who else could introduce me to Heidegger before sophomore year of college?

During one interview (GQ), Hawke was talking about his need to create. He described how making things helps quiet what he calls the void. And then he turned the question back on himself. Why was he so uncomfortable with the void in the first place?

It felt like a mirror. I understand that feeling so well. Creating something feels good. Finishing something feels even better. I can spend hours working on something, and when it’s done, there’s this wonderful sense of satisfaction.

But then what?

There’s another thing to make. Another idea to pursue. I have two options: keep it moving or sleep. And I wonder sometimes whether I’m creating because I love the experience of creating, or because I’m uncomfortable with the experience of not creating. Maybe it’s both. That whole duality thing again (insert frustrated exhale here).

Maybe what I’ve been trying to understand is the difference between creating something and producing something. Because creating feels like an experience. Producing feels like an expectation. And somewhere along the way, we’ve managed to turn nearly every experience into something we’re supposed to ACCOMPLISH.

Even walking. Which is funny, really, because I began walking with an actual goal. One mile. Then two. Something to record on my all-knowing watch.  But then there is also the part of me that spends a ridiculous amount of time standing on the sidewalk while the poodle investigates a particular patch of grass with the seriousness of a detective about to solve a murder.

Sometimes I wonder what she’s finding down there, in her pee-mail checks. Sometimes I’m impatient because I have things to do and time matters, I think. I have a lot of things that I would like to finish at home. But then there’s a bird I haven’t heard before. Or a cloud that pushes through and I imagine which brush I would use to paint it, which colors. By the end of a walk like this, a thought I’ve been turning over for days might make sense. Was it because I gave it space?

Maybe I can just walk. Which is easy to say, of course, with this busy-ass brain I have.

Still, inevitably, tomorrow morning, my alarm clock will whine. I’ll stretch until my legs threaten to detach from my hips. I’ll complain internally about the socks. And then we’ll go outside again.