The most useful piece of life advice I have encountered in months arrived through the well-worn speakers in a pub in Sturgeon Bay, Wis., courtesy of two long-haired guys from Texas who recorded it 54 years ago.

The song is "Summer Breeze." The guys are James Seals and Dash Crofts. And the chorus, which most Americans of a certain age can sing on demand, whether they want to or not, goes like this:

Summer breeze makes me feel fine

Blowin' through the jasmine in my mind

I first heard it as a 7-year-old, through either a tiny transistor radio or the speakers of whatever General Motors gas-guzzler my parents drove the year it hit the airwaves, as people used to say. I misheard the second line as Goin' to the bathroom in my mind, which at the time made more sense to sing about than the actual lyric. It didn't matter.

The song made cosmic sense, even to a child, as a portrait of the right way to live the small moments. You come home after a long day. You see the people who matter to you and to whom you matter. You sit down and appreciate the simplest thing in the world: a June draft fluttering the curtains.

That is the entire prescription, one we're in danger of forgetting how to fill.

What struck me, sitting at that pub bar with my 10-year-old daughter as the iconic 10-note piano opening of "Summer Breeze" grabbed me by the collar, is that we are not failing at this because we lack information. We are failing because we have lost the ability to do nothing important.

Talking to the bartender about the tourists and the weather and the two retrievers sprawled in the grassy yard out back. Telling your kid about a song lyric you misheard 47 years ago and watching her laugh until lemonade drips off her chin. These are the moments that matter. Looking at my phone ... not so much.

Doing nothing important, especially with other people, cost nothing and it was the high point of my week.

In 1975, Seals told Melody Maker that "Summer Breeze" was meant, in a way, to free people from themselves. "A prison can be the prison of self," he said, "and a person can become insecure and paranoid if he doesn't have a direction in his personal life." Read it twice. He was describing 2026 from 51 years away.

Consider how unrecognizable American life has become since this song was new. In 1972, there were three network TV channels. Answering machines were science fiction. American women were two years away from the federal right to open a bank account without a male co-signer. We have gained things worth celebrating and we have lost something too, and the thing we have lost is the unforced pace at which an adult human can sit on a barstool with their kid and pay attention to nothing in particular.

The bridge of "Summer Breeze" says it best: