When you squeeze something into your day, you squeeze something out.

From Alfred’s journal

Switch came by at noon wanting to show me a hollow three yards up the big maple, and I told him I had three things left to do before dark. I did them. I also skipped the long sit on the fence rail I take most afternoons, the one where I watch the light go orange on the Pattersons' siding and think about nothing at all. For years I believed a day was a sack you could keep stuffing, that being busy was only a matter of packing tighter. It is a perch, and a perch holds what it holds. When you squeeze something into your day, you squeeze something out, and the thing that goes is rarely the thing you would have chosen; it is whatever was quiet enough not to complain. I never saw the hollow.