What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

-W.H. Davies

These days, we move too fast. Simon and Garfunkel warned us about this decades ago:

Slow down, you move too fast.

You got to make the morning last…

They were just kids when they wrote it. They would not have had any credible insights into ‘busy-ness’, but the song was a quiet rebellion. The lyric lingers over 6 decades later because it still describes the world we have built: one that moves, measures and squeezes the maximum out of every possible moment. We are not really all that sure about what it all amounts to. What it is all ‘for’?

The working week starts before Sunday ends – some hours before. Mornings start with checking a screen. We scroll over coffee, reply to emails while walking, eat while reading, and plan the next task before the current one is done. Competing priorities, many things demand your attention. Everything urgent, you have to triage most of the time: satisfy who is barking the loudest first.

Popcorn brain. Unfulfillment. Hamster wheel. Emptiness. PTSD from certain ringtones. Passive aggressive emails that hit you like the crack of a baseball bat across your face. That worrying change in your heart rhythm that you have told nobody about.

For homebased workers with families, the children get to see all your stress, your unhappiness, even your ‘work laugh’ and they can see that each time you do it, it takes a toll on you: you die a little inside. What will they remember? What will they learn from observing you? Will they know what it is all for?

This isn’t just working habits that we have fallen into, it’s culture. It is a momentum so constant that we forget that it is optional. And as someone who often works both UK and EST hours, I am amongst the worst offenders.

What I have learned is: when we move too fast for too long, we don’t just lose time. We lose meaning.

The Marriage of Money and Real Estate

That lyric from Simon and Garfunkel is from the song ‘Feeling Groovy’ aka the 59th Street Bridge Song, the bridge which connects Long Island and overlooks Roosevelt Island. If you have ever taken the cable car to Roosevelt Island during Manhattan rush hour, it is a curious contrast. You are gliding above the chaos, above the madness. The car lifts you out of it and moves slowly to drop you in a place that is like small-town USA in the middle of a megacity. The same juxtaposition hits you as you look over the East River to the ongoing kinetic blur of Manhattan from the island, from where there are appropriately placed sculptures quietly denouncing the values of the other side of the river: the Marriage of Money and Real Estate. From this vantage point, the scene strangely seems to slow down, even the helicopters further south towards the UN building seem suspended, hovering like dragonflies. Here, you feel like you can stand and stare. This is recalibration. Sometimes we just need to look at things differently.

We Rarely Appreciate

We were never designed for endless input. Most of us do not perform all that well under pressure, even if we are convinced otherwise. We bloom and flourish in pause.

A lot of our work should not be like an assembly line. Some activities involve thinking and this takes time. So does experiencing feelings. So does weighing up possibilities in your mind and so does paying attention. Insight and inspiration do not often arrive in a flash, you need to give them room to land. In a world that races towards the next thing when the last thing isn’t even complete yet, having the room to think is a real luxury. We live, we work, we scroll, we take selfies, and we become armchair experts. In everything. But really, we notice nothing.

Mindfulness Found Me

I never set out to find mindfulness. It found me. Not through apps, mantras or daft YouTube videos, but quietly, in the best possible way: in the rhythm of the seasons.

First, I started noticing the green buds, then the daffodils, bright and sudden. These give way to bluebells, then cherry blossom, wild garlic, then the daisies and towards the end of summer, the buttercups and the copper and fire tones of Autumn coming around again. Then came other revelations. The call-and-response of all kinds of birds. A fox’s bark. The place where a family of deer often hide. The stretch of time it takes for a swan’s egg to hatch and for the cygnet to finally start trusting the water. And the strange, luminous green of a mallard’s head. It is a very peculiar shade, it seems to drink in and reflect the light at the same time, like a velvet. It is not a colour that you see, but witness. All I needed to do was to stop long enough to notice these things.

The places that know me

We talk about going to places that we know, but all of us have places that know us. Places where you feel welcomed back, not necessarily by the local people, but by objects, landmarks. Places that never ask anything of you other than to be present. Places that are like visiting relatives or old friends: the Peña de los Enamorados. The Puy de Dôme. The streets of Lisbon. Vaduz. Colchester. East 50th Street in Manhattan. Tikal Futura.

And I am a son of Southwick, Sunderland, England. I am from somewhere.

In these places, I feel something close to what Wordsworth meant when he looked out on a new world and wrote:

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.

I had those words tattooed on my own right forearm. I want them to be with me, always. To the grave. They are a reminder of presence.

You don’t have to spend every dawn scrolling. You could start the day quietly, with birdsong and a breeze. Sometimes the most radical act is just to stand still and say:

I am here.

And I see it.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, April 2025