The luxurious of rest! Children and animal seem to know it best. For them time is no tyrant. The fact that the sun rises and sets has nothing to do with a quantity of work to be done, or a certain number of dollars to be earned, and although the importance of these things seems indisputable to adults, it scarcely registers in smaller creatures.
Children and animals are extremely careful about doing exactly what they are doing at any given moment. I have never seen an adult who dozes as skillfully as my cat. Nor do I know a man or woman my age who can swing with the same devotion as my son. Nothing distracts him. When he swings, he swings; when he sleeps, he sleeps. And when he wakes,he knows that it can all begin. For, having had the luxury of rest, he can proceed again to the luxury of time, where clocks are merely flat ticking surfaces and the job at hand is the only one that matters.
I like to think that children and animals, especially children, are not simply an invitaion to nostalgia. Nor do they descend upon us merely as a new test of our mental and emotional endurance. They come because we can learn something from them, and harder it is for us to learn it, the more we need to.
I will have to try this new learning, if only to say that in the middle of my life I suddenly realized I lacked wholeness, the only thing that really mattered. If I can acquire this from my son, who sleeps so soundly when he sleeps, I will possess once again a kind of luxury no money can ever buy.