Brain Food #446
The stillness of our grandparents
Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
An important part of being productive is the ability to spend significant amounts of time doing nothing. I wish I was as good at this as my grandmother. Old people have this inherent appreciation of stopping, finding pleasure in just sitting on a chair, and enjoying the fresh afternoon breeze of the early summer months. Maybe because more time has passed for them, and they are content with what it has brought, and what they have done with it.
Idleness has always divided the greatest minds of the world, and the hyper-productivity of the world we have crafted now dismisses it as a flaw. Perhaps there is something to be discovered in the stillness of our grandparents, in accepting that the moments of stillness are the moments before productivity, the moments of something being brewed within us.
Old man in rocker. Maine, taken by Berenice Abbott in 1967