Time to Stop and Stare

The pleasures of just doing nothing

“What is this life if, full of care / We have no time to stand and stare.”

The Welsh poet (and my namesake) William Henry Davies penned his famous poem ‘Leisure’ in 1911, inviting us to take a breath from the responsibilities and commitments of life and breathe in the natural world as an antidote to the business and bustle of the working week. A “poor life” he concluded was one that had “no time” to “turn at Beauty’s glance.”

Lately I’ve been having some acupuncture treatments and it’s forced me to sit still and just do nothing for 30 minutes in a way that’s made me realise how very little I do this anymore in my normal day to day life.

There would be a time, when I first moved to London, just before the advent of smart phones, where a bus journey would mean either staring out of the window aimlessly for 30 mins or digging in to the latest second hand Penguin Classic I’d procured from the Oxfam secondhand book shop.

Fast forward to 2013 and when I was making the first album there was a small part of me that would actually relish the long 90 minute commute from where I lived. From deepest darkest south east London, all the way across to the far flung corners of north west London, it could sometimes take me two hours each way to get to where I needed to be, both geographically and metaphorically.

You see, far from wasted travel time, it was an opportunity to listen to music, read, scribble notes for lyrics, or just stop and look at the passing buildings, imagining the lives of those that lived inside.