Time to stare?

There’s that poem by W.H. Davies which starts,

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

I’ve always liked it, but unfortunately life these days IS just so full of care isn’t it? There is pressure to be constantly “productive” and “efficient” wringing more out of the time we have. Very often for clients or employers and rarely for ourselves.

But trying to be endlessly productive is not the way to live a happy and fulfilled life. At least not for most people. Cramming every waking moment with supposedly valid activities leaves no time at all to just BE. If you’ve ever seen the “5AM Club” or similar virtue-signalling on social media, you’ll know what I mean.

Living life in a constantly busy and always on manner is like planting a field with crops every single year. Or a sports team playing seven competitive matches every week. Do you know what happens to those? Within a handful of years, the nutrients in the field are used up and nothing else will grow. After a few weeks, the sport team will end up tired, injured and uncompetitive.

Fields need fallow time to rest and recover. For nutrients to build up again so that other things can grow.

Sports teams need time to rest and recover. To reflect and review their performance, and for injuries to heal so that they can play at their very best.

We’re no different from either of those examples. We need time to rest and recover. We need time with nothing to do and no distractions to allow ourselves to rest, heal and recover from the physical and mental load of living in the modern world. Societies throughout history have known this and have built in periods of rest to their week (for instance the Sabbath). In our busy, productive, society I think we’ve lost something of that and are poorer for it.

Most of my best ideas have happened when I was just doing nothing. Or lost in some simple activity that didn’t require much thought. I have very rarely (probably never) had a genuinely creative or problem-solving idea in a small slot of time scheduled for it in an otherwise busy day. It’s not just me either, many. many other people have found the same.

Oh and standing and staring doesn’t have to be literally that (though leaning on a five-bar gate and simply staring into the distance is remarkably therapeutic). It could also be a long walk without distraction, an undisturbed soak in the bath, a long drive alone (one of my favourites) meditation, listening to music or just simply sitting and thinking.

We all need a decent amount of fallow time built into our lives. Guilt-free and rid of the belief that it’s somehow lazy or unproductive. To not do so risks burnout at worst, or at the very least the inability to think creatively. And all of us, regardless of our occupation or whether we see ourselves as creative in the traditional sense, need to think creatively.

So how can you make some time to simply stand and stare? And how might your life benefit if you did?

Photo by Grant Durr on Unsplash