There are two swans on the lake at Temple Newsam. Today they were resting on the bank but when they glide across the water, they are so graceful and so beautiful that it sometimes seems that they epitomise all that life could be if we stopped chasing illusory notions and simply lived as we are created to live. It's so amusing that humanity has, for millennia, considered itself superior to other creatures and yet, as Whitman, so beautifully wrote:

...they are so placid and
self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.