Commentary: I didn’t expect grazing donkeys to teach me about the sweetness of doing nothing

Of all the sources from which I might have expected to draw inspiring philosophical lessons about how to live, I would definitely have put donkeys at the bottom of my list. But I was mistaken.

A few weeks ago, a family of six donkeys came to graze in the pasture next to my family’s house in the southern Italy countryside. Day after day, from sunrise to sunset, these herbivores ambled through underbrush in the blistering July heat — tails swishing, ears twitching, shoulders shuddering — and munched away on the grass, hay