Sublime

Yet Taggart’s question remained a daily companion: “If work dominated your every moment, would life be worth living?”

want to be told what to do and how to do it, without ever understanding why. They want quick steps to easy living. Life is not like that. It is variable. It changes whether we plan for it or not. Our systems need to be flexible to adapt to this variation.

Organizations often fall prey to the dangerous fallacy that freedom and structure represent opposing forces and that more of one means less of the other.

maintain a healthy sense of perspective

The inhabitant of the city is in touch with thousands of systems, but only peripherally with each. He knows how to operate the TV or the telephone, but their workings are hidden from him. Learning by primary experience is restricted to self-adjustment in the midst of packaged commodities. He feels less and less secure in doing his own thing.

Here’s Kreider’s explanation: Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets … it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.