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Then there’s work. What a difference it is being able to work when it suits me, maybe take the afternoon off and catch up in the evening. Although I’d negotiated my old job down to three days a week after the birth of my second child, I still had to deliver work within a fixed time frame. Also, if I’d carried on in that “moment” (lovely as it was, I had been doing it for five years), I might never have realised how good it feels to have changed everything. Now, it’s easier to accommodate the unexpected, and it feels good to be flexible without sweaty panic and punishing guilt.

Driving home from a weekend away recently, for the first time I could remember I felt calm and in control. My usual Sunday-night stress fest was absent. Phone calls, e-mails and promises I had made were now my responsibility, not something I would put off until I was nagged. It feels right that my working life is solely down to me. And there is inevitably more me time: I’ve finally taken up riding, which had been on my to-do list only for the past decade, while my list of hobbies — from bee-keeping to learning to sail — grows and grows.

I now see the issue of reduced choice in the countryside — something that puts so many people off — as an advantage. There is only one big music festival nearby, so that’s the one you go to. Wondering if you are missing something, somewhere else that could be better doesn’t even enter your head. Because there isn’t. When friends come to stay, you have catch-ups that you could never manage over a few squeezed hours of supper in the city. In my old life, I was a headless chicken, skipping from one party to the next, but now I’m in one place from start to finish, right until the sun sets.

Find ways to step out of the frame, says Tom Hodgkinson

We live in a society that values the thrill of action above the more deeply satisfying pleasures of contemplation. The admen aggressively promote gadgets such as the BlackBerry that promise to transform you into what they call a “superhuman” leading a life of nonstop activity. But, of course, what BlackBerries do is remove us from the present. In helping us to do more, they prevent us from simply being. In fact, this present moment is all we have. There is no past or future. There is only the now.

So, how do we reconnect with it? One strategy is to turn off the gadgets and go for a walk. Disconnect the wires; reconnect with nature. You don’t need to travel to Thailand: you need only take a stroll around the park. The sky is always above you, a fascinating, ever-changing collage of colours. There are always trees and birds to watch. When I am in London, I will walk for two hours rather than submit myself to “that vapour bath of hurried and discontented humanity”, which is how William Morris described the London Underground in 1890.

Yes, take a walk. Get off the bus two stops earlier. Walk to work. Walk in your lunch break. Dawdle on those delicious free loafing zones called public benches. Wander into old churches. Imagine that you are a Romantic poet, dreaming of a golden age before we were all condemned to slavery in the modern workplace.

Another way is to hang out with beings who have not transformed themselves into harbours of worry and regret — and that means small children and animals. Being silly with young ones, making faces and playing with them, is a sure-fire way of escaping the manacles of clock time (although I make an exception for the hell of pushing them on swings — that’s not play, that’s torture). Animals seem to inhabit the present with uncomplaining grace, and I think we can learn something from their stoic attitude to life. And small children have not yet been educated in the ideas of A to B in the fastest possible time.

Last, hide your watch. You can usually find out the time somehow or other if necessary, but wearing a watch makes you too intensely aware of it. Without a watch, at least you have the chance of forgetting what the time is every now and then, and therefore living in “eternity’s sunrise”, as Blake put it.

A stroke taught Dr Jill Bolte Taylor to tune out to stress

In December 1996, aged 37 and working as a neuroanatomist, I experienced a significant stroke in the left side of my brain. Within a few hours, I lost the ability to walk, talk, read and write. But existing only in the right hemisphere, I was in a state of bliss. There was no cognition of my external life, no sense of responsibility or stress. I was like a newborn. I was only in the moment. When you’re in the moment, everything is relaxed and the mind opens up: in its interest, its capacity, its exploration — that’s why it’s so creative and satisfying. There is no sense of time. There is no judgment — of me, against me, around me, by me.

Stress soon wanted to come back online, but I didn’t like the way it felt in my body — the tension in my chest, my breath getting shorter, my shoulders becoming tighter and elevated, the clenching of my jaw. But because I didn’t have incessant noise distracting me from it, I was able to recognise that stress was just neural circuitry, and that I had a conscious ability not to put myself into that emotional state, one that would produce that particular physiological response.

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