GWS :: thirty-eight
I think here of Schumacher’s lovely story about the old shepherd’s advice to the young shepherd. “Don’t count the sheep,” he said, “or else they won’t thrive.”
By this he meant that if you counted the sheep you would turn each real, live, unique animal into an abstraction or a symbol for a sheep, every one like every other,
sheep = sheep = sheep,
and so would begin to lose sight of them as individual sheep, and fail to notice whether they were remaining healthy, energetic, their best sheep selves.
–John Holt in Growing Without Schooling