Plato said "a life which is unexamined is not worth living." But I don’t think he meant examining should take the place of living. I don’t think he meant we should be so busy mining our adventures for meaning that we don’t have time to live them.

Of course writers use their lives as text and context. That’s part of the gig. Although I do not often write about myself, everything I have written in the past decade and a half is deeply connected to my life, a reflection of who I am or who I was or what mattered most. I know that life and art can mix, enriching both. But the danger -- the danger I recognized when I saw my son hunched over a notebook instead of marveling at the landscape -- is that art can overpower life. It can replace the experience of living.

I recently met a woman whose mother had just died of cancer. She might have spent the last year of her mother’s life with her mother, but instead she chose to spend it hundreds of miles away at the keyboard, crafting long, lyrical, literary letters about her mother’s illness which she arranged to send to an acquaintance. Before she drafted the first letter, she imagined the book the letters would some day become.

She told me this proudly while on tour promoting the book, and I tried hard not to look horrified. I appreciate that writing can be therapeutic. No doubt the letters helped her through a difficult time. But writing also detached her from the present -- from being present -- and shielded her from the moment. Her present was painful, mine was pleasant, but we were both prisoners of our craft.

I was at first concerned, scared really, that I’d be wasting the experience of the trip if I didn’t write about it. And what would I say to all my friends who kept asking: "So, have you written about that trip yet?" But I am beginning to understand that it pays to "waste" some things, if wasting means living the moment fully rather than taking notes on it for later.

We’ve been home for a while now, but I still cherish the long mid-June days I wasted with my sons, the mornings full of talk and silence, me driving, the boys taking their turns sitting up front by my side, sometimes dreamy, wordless, other times deep in monologues full of mind-numbing details about computer games and wars waged with little pewter action figures. But there was thoughtful talk too, conversations about what makes a good friend and how you decide what you want to be when you grow up and why grandma died.

At noon we would stop at some local park, where the boys would explore the terrain and play tag and fight off the insects while I busied myself in the tiny kitchen heating up cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli and slicing apples. I loved to watch them from the window and listen to their voices, loud and confident. Wherever we were -- Little America, Wyoming; Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Byhallyah, Alabama -- they were immediately at home. The afternoon stretched out before us. We would eat and then spread the maps on the grass and plot the rest of the day: how many miles, how many states, which campground.

After lunch, they would often disappear into the upper bunk for hours to drowse or read or play with their Gameboys or get on each other’s nerves. I drove in silence, aware of them jostling above me, happy to be close but separate. Some afternoons Zane would sit by my side, and we’d listen and relisten to a tape of Wind in the Willows, enjoying the tale of Rat and Mole as if we hadn’t heard it a dozen times before. Other afternoons it would be Jackson, my older son, who would join me. Once we whiled away an afternoon composing an epic poem about road-kill. But often we simply sat together, our minds blanked by the tedium of the road. We listened to the thrumm of tires on pavement. We breathed the warm, close air. Time slowed.

There was real pleasure in this boredom, these hours and days and weeks of traveling together, of being together, of just being. The things we did, the places we saw, the thoughts we had about ourselves and each other were part of that time, and that time alone.

I think some adventures should be lived just for the sake of the adventure. Some feelings should be private; some lessons learned for one’s benefit alone. Life, even for a writer, can just be life, not a narrative to be crafted and sold.

We leave for a camping trip to the mountains next week. The reporter’s notebook stays at home.

(This essay, in a slightly different form) first appeared in Oregon Quarterly.)

LAUREN KESSLER's tenth book, Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the spy who ushered in the McCarthy Era, will be published by HarperCollins in August 2003. She is the director of the literary nonfiction program at the University of Oregon and the editor of Etude.