Downtime

and why you need it

All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time upon this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

W.B. Yeats, The Wild Swans At Coole

I have been reading this poem by W.B. Yeats for over 30 years. There’s something about the sadness in Yeats’ poetry that has always attracted me. That sense of yearning. Of an older man recalling the “lighter tread” of his youth, that exquisite sense of unrecoverable loss.

This, for me, is comfort poetry. When I find myself treading heavily through life, as I have done the past few weeks, there’s something magical about hearing from people like Yeats. There is an echo in his poetry of my own experience of life, of that movement between elation and despair, joy and sadness, between energetic engagement and depletion.

The question about what to do when you are at the bottom of that cycle has always interested me. What do you do when you experience despair, sadness and depletion?

Spiritual, philosophical and re…