Horses
I love horses. I have never had a clever reason ready for it. It is the size of them — something that big, standing quietly, as though standing quietly were the most natural thing in the world to be doing — and then the way they look at you. Not through you, not past you. At you. As though they worked something out about you a while ago and decided not to mention it.
You can watch a horse for a long time and it will not perform for you. It will stand there. It will shift its weight from one leg to another. It will tear at the grass and chew with its whole jaw, slowly, like it has nowhere to be. And you realise you have been standing at the fence for twenty minutes, and the horse has not once changed what it is doing, and you did not mind. That is the thing. You did not mind.
I think what I love is that they are not trying to be anything. A horse in a field is just a horse in a field. There is no angle. No second thing happening underneath the first thing. You can look at one and not have to work out what it wants from you.
That is the whole of it. I could watch one all afternoon.
Origami
I like origami. You start with a square and end with a bird. Nothing is cut and nothing is glued, and it either works or it does not — you know which one it is going to be fairly early on, about three folds in, when the paper starts to resist or starts to cooperate.
It is quiet work. You cannot rush the folds. If you try to rush them you get a soft crease instead of a sharp one and the whole thing is slightly wrong from that point onward, like a sentence with a word missing. So you slow down. You press with your thumbnail. You line the edges up properly before you commit.
And the committing is the part I like, I think. A fold is a fold. You cannot undo it fully. The paper remembers. So each one is a small decision made carefully, and then you move on to the next one, and the next one, and at some point you look down and there is a wing, or a beak, or the whole shape of the thing, and it was just a square.
You cannot do it while thinking about something else. Or you can, but it goes wrong, and you have to start again, and that is fine too. Starting again is part of it.