Don't try to kill time or it will kill you first

Another Life: It's a long, long time from May to December/
And the days grow short when you reach September/
When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame/
And I haven't got time for the waiting game . . .

That bitter-sweet melody seems to have haunted me, on and off, for much of my life, as if to train me up as a Walter Huston wannabe. It sneaks in again as I take the Christmas cards down for the second or third time in a year.

According to Etna's Theory of Relativity, perception of time passing is a function of how long one has lived: to a four-year-old, a year is forever; in one's 70s, mere weeks. Those chirpy 93-year-olds interviewed on television are great guarantors of optimism, but must be living in a closing whirl of birthdays.

Thus, a certain desperation colours my wisdom in urging a two-fold New Year's resolution - not on the young, who are properly contemptuous in these matters, but on the middle-aged and perpetually irresolute. First, not to put off any longer whatever it is you've always wanted to do. And second, to learn the fine art of living for now.

I had a heartfelt letter from a reader who had taken early retirement and had taken his wife to live in a cottage on half an acre of rocky, boggy land in a mountain valley in Co Donegal. He was getting cross with his erstwhile Dublin colleagues, who couldn't understand what he did all day, and also with the locals who, seeing him digging and draining and building walls, or just walking up the mountain in the rain, would sympathise knowingly: "Sure it passes the time."

Here he got quite heated. "I'm not just passing the time - this is my life's work. Surely there's more passing of time done in offices and by people with 'real' jobs - waiting for 5pm, waiting for Friday, for the holidays, for Christmas."

He wound up with Thoreau's observation, just before the bit about the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation: "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." A self-directed life, made secure by "downsizing" to the core of your real needs, does change your view of time. Not only are you free to live in the present, but you had better start enjoying it, because, at the age of 40 or 50 or whatever, this is it, the future has arrived.

As someone who'd been chronically frustrated by the city's killing of time (all those coffees and pints, all that hanging about for the traffic to clear, or for other, incessantly tardy people), I remember the shocking epiphany of realising that I now had no excuses for putting off being happy: there was nothing and no one left to blame.

It can still take some determination to live in the present and to risk being unconditionally happy, as it were. Most of my transcendental moments occur outdoors, alongside nature. On a fine afternoon before Christmas, I went to gather a sackful of twigs as kindling for the stove. Where trees now crowd the acre, the old fuchsia bushes that nursed them in the gales are withering and dry beneath them; the dead branches snap delightfully.

The sound and its echo woke the great hush of the hillside and switched on the glow of the light on mosses and fallen leaves. The happiness had to do with awareness, a sense of connection that gets little chance among driven preoccupations. (WH Davies got there first: his line, "What is this life if, full of care/ We have no time to stand and stare", has an immortality all its own.)

Some primal want of this sort is helping to drive the flood of retirement to the countryside, only some of which will be successful. To be happy in the country, especially in its out-of-the-way corners, needs a self-sufficiency of spirit, a vigorous nature, neither of which can be readily assumed in one's 60s. Rural GPs know the psychosomatic ills of settlers who miss their grandchildren, their old friends, their outings, but cannot admit their misery to each other.

It's not always enough, evidently, just to change the view from the window. To cope with the country in all its moods and weathers - above all in winter, which is when we happen to love it best - there has to be some active engagement with nature, some positive passion, whether for astronomy or birds or painting or making things grow. When Gaia sees a life just withering on the vine, she's apt to send a puff of wind.