What is this life if full of care
We have no time to stand and stare
- WH Davies
“The most important thing you need to do… is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking.”
(Barack Obama in conversation with British conservative party leader David Cameron.)
But how do you do that? Some ideas to be found here.
And, if we can’t do it for ourselves can we at least help out with the over scheduled child? According to this article in yesterday’s NYTimes even summer camp leaves no time unfilled.
That familiar couplet on time to think comes from Welsh poet WH Davies – the original supertramp. He lost a leg jumping a train in Canada and regarded arrests for vagrancy as an occupational hazard and an opportunity to take a break. He nevertheless managed to get himself no less than seven portraits in the London’s National Portrait Gallery, Maybe it was all that standing still that made the artists’ job easier.
I was born in the same town as WH Davies so I have always taken an interest in him. Everyone knows those two lines from the poem Leisure but here is another less well known poem of a lesson to be learned from nature. I wonder if anyone reads his Autobiography anymore.It was one of my favourite books when I was about ten and I wanted to jump a ship and head for the States and ride the rails out west where the cowboys were. In stead I joined the navy and saw a lot of Portsmouth.
John P. from Newport.