First rule of living is to live.

Posted on by Live & Learn

Anna wandered down to the sea. She knelt in front of some of the stone nest houses and peered in. Anna’s life here was, I was coming to see, devoted to paying attention to – or, more than that, being completely committed to – the beauty of the world before her. She seemed to have done it by cultivating an extraordinary form of independence from other people, their values, and their noise. She used every ounce of her willfulness to shut out the world and concentrate on these simple things. More and more, she reminded me of my grandfather. He spent many hours walking his farm and learning about the wild things upon it, like it was the most important work a human could do. Growing up, I’d wanted to be like him. And I was, for three or four years, after I left school. I’d go for walks over the fields; on sunny nights I’d sit with my back against a rock or climb into the lower branches of a tree and watch the world happening around me. I’d spend hours just watching deer or foxes or badgers, or swifts tumbling and screaming through the sky. I’d lie on my back in the grass and watch the swallows hawking after flies round my dad’s cows, or the brown hares playing in the meadows. But somewhere in the years since, I’d stopped being that person. Life was too busy to stand and stare. I became responsible for boring, necessary things. At one point I had three jobs and worked most nights and weekends. D. H. Lawrence once wrote that the industrial age had created a new kind of human, a machine-like man with iron in his soul. I had become one of them. The past few years had been swallowed up by striving. I remembered a friend back home trying to tell me, gently, that I had become almost manic. But the longer I spent with Anna, the more that way of being felt like a sickness I needed to recover from. A new calmness began to settle over me. It was a feeling I had not known since I was a child following my grandfather round his fields.

Anna reminded me that the first rule of living is to live. To see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the world. The more I tuned in, the closer Anna and I were growing as friends. I was beginning a journey back to the person I had once been – and needed to be again.

— James Rebanks, from the Prelude of “The Place of Tides” (Mariner Books, June 24, 2025)

Notes:

  • Loved the book. Highly recommended.
  • Book Review: A warming tale of gathering eiderdown in Norway. Shepherd’s Life author trades the Lake District for a remote island just below the Arctic Circle, where he joins an ‘unbreakable’ septuagenarian keeping an ancient family tradition alive.
  • Book Review in The Guardian: “Duck Tales. The Lakeland shepherd heads to a Norwegian island where eiderdown is harvested to learn lessons about nature and humanity”
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

22 thoughts on “First rule of living is to live.”

  1. “D. H. Lawrence once wrote that the industrial age had created a new kind of human, a machine-like man with iron in his soul.”

    It is a fascinating Catch-22… Though… Is it not? For without the industrial revolution and what has followed… You would not have been able to share this post with the world, for the computer would not exist.

    (I am not well read, but Catch-22 is indeed, my very favorite book.)

    1. Yet here we are, David Kanigan and I, wide awake at 1:30 AM on a Sunday morning… Unable to sleep… Is it because of this out of control industrial revolution that has been going on for the past 100+ years… with no end in site?

      1. I wonder if somewhere there is a balance…a point somewhere between the work of tending to the fields, and the work of inventing the transistor. Perhaps we never even saw that balance point, and we moved blindly and foolishly at lightning speed, towards the transistor and beyond…to the world we live in now. It looks to me like this is what has happened, at least in the part of the world in which I currently live.

        (I will end my amateur attempt at philosophy at this point. For I am certainly no philosopher. I simply woke up to the site of this post, sitting in a world that at this moment, seems quite insane.)

  2. Smiling. Esp at “Yet here we are, David Kanigan and I, wide awake at 1:30 AM on a Sunday morning… Unable to sleep… Is it because of this out of control industrial revolution that has been going on for the past 100+ years… with no end in site?” Thanks for sharing your thoughts Paul.

  3. perhaps the first rule of living is to just go with it and not fight it. if we are awake at 1:30 in the morning, we are awake at 1:30 in the morning. why do we have to wait for a certain time to be awake?

  4. “To see, hear, smell, touch and taste the world”

    This excerpt caused a cascading sense of gratitude for the ability to take pictures in the morning when it feels like the world is asleep.

    And… oddly…. The desire to slow down, stand in a bakery and take in the smell of fresh bread.

    Another blog post that landed here. Thank you DK.

      1. Don’t think I can just smell fresh bread… Far too tempting! 🙂 I can however, “inhale fresh bread”. Typically one half loaf at a time! (Wally can have the other half… Or Dave… Or Susan… Or Cara… whoever wins the race!)

      2. You must not have ever stood in a bakery…. “Smell the roses”… cookies and bread.

  5. I’ve been thinking regularly about purchasing a camera recently! However, the range of choices and prices are overwhelming! Not easy for a beginner to know where to start! Don’t wanna buy anything that requires an upgrade anytime soon. The addition of a zoom lens is required as I want to be able to take “sneaky pictures”… like the beautiful birds Dave catches on a regular basis. 🙂

    Nikon seems to be the Ferrari of cameras (at least in the past)… But I see a ton of Canon products that look good out there as well!

    Amazon prime day starts in two days! Dare, I buy a camera through Amazon? The thought makes me shudder! I never buy Apple products through Amazon as I have read too many horror stories in the reviews when it comes time for service/warranty work.

    1. All of the major camera systems are excellent (Canon, Sony, Nikon) with Nikon making a comeback after being a distant third for a while. Buying from Amazon with its 39’day return policy with no restocking fee is almost a no brainer. Sign and drive and return if you don’t like it. Tough to get all purpose everyday lens + a longer zoom without dropping a small fortune. Some have bought this camera and like it. You might check it out. https://www.amazon.com/Nikon-26532-COOLPIX-P950/dp/B083K41SKC

Leave a Reply