Time & Perspective Quote by Eileen Caddy

The sentence reads like a permission slip disguised as advice: not to optimize your life, not to curate your “self-care,” but to stop producing long enough to remember you exist. Caddy’s genius here is the restraint. “From time to time” lowers the bar; she’s not demanding a retreat-to-the-mountains lifestyle, just a recurring interruption of the machine. The repetition of “to” creates a gentle stair-step rhythm, slowing the reader as it lists increasingly radical acts: slow down, go away, be alone, be.

That last phrase, “simply be,” is doing the heavy lifting. It’s a quiet rebuke of modern identity as output - emails sent, content posted, goals hit, even wellness tracked. “Simply” suggests that being is the default state we’ve somehow made feel irresponsible. The subtext is that solitude isn’t loneliness; it’s a recalibration, a return to a self not mirrored back by other people’s expectations.

Context matters because Caddy isn’t a pop celebrity in the fame-industrial sense; she became well-known as a spiritual writer tied to the Findhorn community, a mid-20th-century countercultural experiment in inner listening and communal living. That backdrop gives the line its specific intent: contemplation as practice, not aesthetic. In a culture that treats stillness like laziness and aloneness like a red flag, Caddy offers an older, quietly insurgent idea: the most restorative thing you can do is stop auditioning for your own life.