Sometimes we need a rupture with a daily routine marked by a stifling monotony. We need to wake up on a sunny or rainy day and make a decision not to do anything we usually do throughout the week, to replace drinking coffee in the kitchen with having tea in the garden or in the living room.
To do all the things our daily obligations never allow us to do, to accomplish what we once wished for but were denied by time and crowded schedules. To do what pleases us without thinking about anyone else, to focus for a moment on satisfying ourselves, and to allow a measure of healthy selfishness—so we can rest from thinking about others’ needs, colleagues’ opinions, and the irritable mood of a boss.
Let us change one day in our lives and choose to do nothing at all; this is a comforting proposal for anyone accustomed to being a work machine that never stops. We need pauses in which we say to time, “Stop for one day—what harm could that do?”
That feeling which overtakes us when we stop running for the first time awakens within us the senses of contemplation and wonder. It reminds me of the sensation I feel every time I climb to the roof of the storehouse—a wide terrace—and look down at the garden below. I notice details I never see when I observe it only from the level of the door leading to it. And this is life, in my view: we live at such a pace that we overlook the most beautiful things it contains.
