It was a Dallas morning, in early June this year.

Already warm. Already bright. My daughter and I were sitting in the small garden behind the house, doing nothing in particular. The kind of nothing that usually lasts only until someone reaches for a phone.

She spotted it first.

A still insect clinging to a blade of grass. Perfectly formed. Perfectly unmoving.

Dead, we assumed. And declared so. Quickly.

We still leaned in. Looked closer. It did not have the careless look of something crushed or abandoned. It seemed intact. Intentional. As if it had chosen that exact spot.

We began guessing. Beetle? Grasshopper? Something more interesting? We debated seriously, the way children do, and adults quietly enjoy. We turned it gently. Examined the legs. The head. The odd lightness of it.

Then the realisation arrived. With some help.

It was not an insect at all.

It was a shell.

A cicada had grown inside it and, at some point, calmly stepped out. Growth completed. Old skin left behind. No drama. No hurry. Just a quiet exit under the Texas sun.

What surprised me later was not the discovery itself, but how I felt afterwards. I was strangely energised. Light. Refreshed. We had not rested. We had not done anything useful. And yet something had shifted.

I noticed that I had been fully present. Not half-there. Not thinking ahead. Just there, crouched in the heat, absorbed in a small mystery. And I found myself wondering why that felt so restorative. It felt like leisure, though nothing about it resembled how leisure is usually described.

Wonder at Cruising Altitude

Two days later, I was flying from Dallas to the East Coast. Seatbelt light on. Coffee barely drinkable. Clouds stretched endlessly beneath the wing, like a slow, patient design lesson. Somewhere between cruising altitude and mild jet lag, I was reading David Steindl-Rast.

Steindl-Rast is a Benedictine monk best known for his writing on gratefulness and everyday spirituality. Not the dramatic kind. The attentive kind. And there it was, tucked into the page as if it did not need emphasis.

He wrote that leisure is not the absence of activity but the presence of wonder.

The line landed differently at 35,000 feet. The Dallas garden returned instantly. The shell. The crouching. The strange lift I had felt afterwards. That moment finally had a name.

Around that time, the idea of leisure had been circling me anyway. Conversations with friends. Reading and writing essays to clarify what leisure meant to me. Many of my friends seemed drawn to the same question. How to make time for leisure. How to protect it. And, how to schedule it before it slipped away.

Steindl-Rast’s line quietly undid all of that.

Leisure had not arrived because time had opened up that morning in Dallas. Time had not changed at all. Attention had. Wonder had been allowed in. Leisure and wonder, I realised, have less to do with calendars and far more to do with how awake we are to the moment in front of us.

Children seem to understand this without effort. They do not ask whether something is useful before being fascinated by it. A shell on a blade of grass is enough. Adults tend to wait for permission. Or purpose. Or a clear outcome.

That cicada shell offered none of those.

Not even an invitation to look closer. It sat there in casual indifference, until attention and curiosity cast their quiet spell. Something ordinary came alive. The mind loosened. And, without effort, it relaxed.

And that, it turns out, was plenty.

Leisure came not from creating space, but from entering the moment more fully.

It is December now. Many people are looking ahead to leisure. Calendars are being cleared. Time is being protected.

On that bright June morning, we discovered that the cicada shell has a small crack along its back. Nothing dramatic. Just enough for something larger to leave. I like to think wonder works in much the same way. It does not wait for empty days or perfect conditions. It slips in through small openings, through moments when attention loosens and something ordinary is allowed to surprise us. And it refreshes the soul in a remarkable way.

Yes. We could stop sealing every moment shut and not wait for free time to soak into leisure!