20 – At this very moment, what sound(s) can you hear, apart from the computer?

The drone of traffic. I hear a car coming down the road from my left. It passes the window and then drives almost directly away from me. Over and over and over again. I can also hear builders putting up scaffolding, running a generator, the pump on the fridge. I'm also humming to myself. An Adele song I can't get out of my head.

There's a certain zen joy to attending very carefully to your senses. It's a good discipline, every now and then to really listen, or to really look at things. Back when I was drawing and painting a lot, I found that the longer I looked at a thing the more I saw. It didn't work if I just stared at a thing, I had to be drawing it. The act of drawing, of making a faithful representation of what the eye recorded - rather than what the brain saw - forced my mind out of its usual habits. Areas of light and shade on the paper, where more graphite, or less has been deposited, either was what I saw, or wasn't. If it wasn't the task was to make further marks, or erase them to bring reality and reproduction into closer harmony.

This is not an easy thing to begin doing. At first there is nothing on the paper, so the task is to make marks. This is not easy. There are a thousand things that suddenly you want to do. Pencils need sharpening, rubbers need cleaning, the light is not quite angled right, the seat is too hard.

Eventually, though, the excuses run out and there's nothing left to do but put down an outline, fill it in. The eye starts to flick back and fore, comparing, criticising. Sometimes the hand moves, sometimes it waits. The waiting is important. Sometimes it lasts whole minutes as the eye assesses and the blockades between eye and hand are slowly dismantled.

What mark should be made next?

Is this line too heavy, or too straight?

Hours pass. The body barely moves. The eye flicks back and fore. The marks you made hours before start to take on meaning. You put them down because that is what you saw. This pale area becomes the diffuse reflection of a white cup on the surface of another. A darker area of shading becomes the shadow of a leaf. The subtle relationships between objects, the faintest of echoes that all things have with one another are revealed.

Eventually, you come to a natural end. What you have is imperfect but can't be improved. The first marks you made were in error and couldn't later be fixed. Next time, maybe, you will attend more closely at the start, but you never do.