Sometimes life feels like waiting for a train at Penn Station. A lot of people are waiting with you, and nobody really knows how to get on the train, so, when the crowd surges toward one of the gates, you surge with it. What you need is a little perspective, and that's hard to get from somebody who's in the same crowd you're in.
“It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one until you have read an old one in between. . . . The only palliative [to our chronological snobbery] is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds. . . .” C. S. Lewis