I could call this blog a melancholy but poignant moment that I should certainly take to heart far more often and, I suspect, many of my readers could as well. It is an article by Luke Burgis, which contains a poem by the Welsh poet W.H. Davies, written in 1911. It is followed by a poem written by a terminally ill young woman in New York, which speaks to the same sentiment. Please enjoy and, if you feel it is appropriate, take these thoughts as a guide to a better life.
Luke Burgis wrote, “I need to remind myself every day to stop, for a second, and look at the world I’m trying to build in. That’s why I love this poem.
My wife loves to tease me about how often I stand and stare out of windows. She caught our 17-month-old daughter standing in front of one the other day, mimicking me with her tiny hands clasped behind her back. But for part of my life, I lost that ability to stop and just look at the world. It’s an ability that I didn’t fully appreciate until it was gone.
I don’t know exactly when I lost it but, prior to the pandemic, I had the growing realization that everything was moving too fast for me – and I couldn’t keep up. The progression of my dad’s Alzheimer’s was happening fast. Friends got married and divorced, and children were growing old too fast. The days went by too quickly. I thought, “Is this just what getting older feels like?”
Even during the quiet of Covid, when I was holed up in a house on Lake Michigan, I felt no reprieve. The video calls increased. Everyone expected more availability, more responsiveness. There were a few days when, inspired by the beauty of the lake, I would break free from my screen-based work and position myself in front of one of the windows, clasping my hands loosely in front of me, fingers interlaced and resting at my waist, a posture that felt something like prayer. For a brief moment, a flicker of light stirred in my soul – before the anxiety set in again. I was falling behind.
I think digital scrolling induces a kind of blackout. Not in the way alcohol causes one, but in the sense that time disappears without anything worth remembering. There are days I can barely recall – not because they were traumatic, but because they were simply unmemorable. A digital fog. Hours passed without touching anything real. No texture. No depth. Just input.
I kept telling myself that this was just a particularly busy season of life, that things would ease up in a few months. But those months never arrived – only more demands, more difficult news, more responsibility. The future didn’t open up the way I imagined. It narrowed into the truth: This is the life I have, and the time to live it is now. But for many months, which ran into years, I felt stuck like one feels stuck to the wall of that famous carnival ride, the Gravitron – everything spinning so fast that gravity pushes you in directions you didn’t intentionally choose, and you are forced against a wall.
I know I’m not alone. Friends confide in me that even their off-grid moves – homesteads, farms, flip phones—haven’t freed them from the grip of speed. Because we’re all still tuned in to the same global village, whether we like it or not. The structure of modern life is not built to allow for stillness. There’s always another headline, another podcast, another crisis. And in the face of this endless motion, many of us have developed a spiritual condition that the desert fathers called acedia.
The term was first used in a technical sense by Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth-century monk, who described it as one of the eight psychological temptations, or logismoi, that turn a person away from what truly matters. Acedia is often translated as sloth, but that doesn’t quite capture its true nature. Acedia isn’t laziness. It’s something more subtle – and more dangerous. It’s restless paralysis, a resistance to presence, a refusal to engage with what matters most. It’s what makes even a quiet room feel unbearable. It’s what turns vacations into acts of subtle desperation. Acedia is the soul’s allergic reaction to reality.
It is, above all, the loss of the ability to dwell.
Before time started speeding up for me, I was living in Italy, training for the Catholic priesthood. I ultimately did not become one, but during my time in seminary, I experienced what it was like to live without that restlessness. I had a routine grounded in prayer, study, and community. I learned how to meriggiare – a somewhat untranslatable Italian word that means something like “to while away the afternoon,” perhaps with a good book and a glass of wine (or two), wandering through the alleyways of Rome, popping into shops and bookstores, or simply sitting at a good café and people-watching. A person afflicted with acedia can’t do this – they can’t adhere to reality for more than a few minutes without reaching into their pocket for a distraction. I know because I’ve been there.
When I moved back to the United States in 2016, to a relatively tense atmosphere in our country, I felt lucky to have the habits that I’d developed during my five years of living in Italy – but it didn’t take long before they began to fall away. I no longer had a strong community to support me. I thought I could survive without it; I thought that I could walk into the middle of the desert of modernity with a single jug of water and survive for the rest of my life. I made it about 18 months.
And though the things I’m building now, I hope, are shaped by a spirit of groundedness, rather than restlessness, I still need daily reminders to help me. That’s why I keep coming back to a short poem by the Welsh poet W.H. Davies, written in 1911. It’s called “Leisure.” You may have heard the last two lines, with which I began this piece, but the entire poem deserves your attention – maybe even a place in your memory.
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
What struck me the first time I read this poem in full was not only its beauty, but the fact that it was written more than a hundred years ago. Davies was not responding to smartphones or the 24/7 news cycle. He was defending a way of being in the world that was already under threat. By this point, modern life was already becoming reoriented around what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) described, in his 1968 classic Introduction to Christianity, as the paradigm of know-make. That is, the idea that we must understand the world in order to manipulate it, produce from it, use it. Ratzinger contrasts this with a posture he names “stand-understand”: Before you try to know the world, simply stand before it. Plant your feet in a stance of receptivity.
Standing is a matter of faith: My ability to stare out of a window depends on my faith in the goodness of that act, and in the knowledge that the world, or my own business, or my book, won’t fall apart around me if I stop and connect myself to the reality around me. In fact, they will be made better for it. A future where humans can flourish won’t be built by those who move fastest, but by those who remember how to stand still. Until we recover the courage to choose stillness when necessary, when the world is moving frantically around us, we will mistake velocity for vision. We will keep accelerating – not toward the good, but simply away from the ground.
Right now, I encourage you to find the nearest window and, if you haven’t already, learn how to stand and stare. Feel yourself slow down. After that, you can work boldly in the knowledge you’ve actually seen and understand the world you’re working to improve.
The poem, “SLOW DANCE” by the terminally ill young girl in New York:
Have you ever watched kids on a merry-go-round?
Or listened to the rain slapping on the ground?
Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight?
Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?
YOU BETTER SLOW DOWN. DON’T DANCE SO FAST. TIME IS SHORT. THE MUSIC WON’T LAST.
Do you run through each day on the fly?
When you ask, “How are you?”
Do you hear the reply?
When the day is done, do you lie in your bed.
With the next hundred chores running through your head?
YOU BETTER SLOW DOWN. DON’T DANCE SO FAST. TIME IS SHORT. THE MUSIC WON’T LAST.
Ever told your child, we’ll do it tomorrow?
And in your haste, Not see his sorrow?
Ever lost touch, let a good friendship die.
Cause you never had time. To call and say “Hi”.
YOU BETTER SLOW DOWN. DON’T DANCE SO FAST. TIME IS SHORT. THE MUSIC WON’T LAST.
When you run so fast to get somewhere, You miss half the fun of getting there.
When you worry and hurry through your day, It’s like an unopened gift….Thrown away.
LIFE IS NOT A RACE. DO TAKE IT SLOWER. HEAR THE MUSIC, BEFORE THE SONG IS OVER.
