‘When I hear people talking about happiness I have no idea what they mean, but then, it’s not something you talk about, it’s something you do.  Bake pies, chop logs.  At a certain point, the mere sense of living is joy enough. … It takes a lifetime, for some of us at least, to know that the best things in life are the boring, everyday things. … They’re not really boring, of course.  It’s just that we lack the imagination, when we’re young, to see those everyday chores and rituals for what they really are.’

A friend sent me this quote by John Burnside recently, and of course I could not help but think of the famous lines of Layman Pang. A thousand years may lie between the two utterances, but human wisdom does not evolve so much:

‘How miraculous and wondrous,
Hauling water and carrying firewood.’