But it often doesn’t work like this. Most of us depend on activity in the same way that we depend on distractions like television. We use activity as a way of keeping our attention focused outside ourselves.
Not long after leaving university, I took a temporary office job, in the pensions department of an engineering firm. I did a number of dreary jobs around that time, but this was undoubtedly the dreariest. There was a small room in the office full of shelves packed with dozens of boxes of old pension forms—one for every person who had ever worked for the company. My task was to sort the forms into alphabetical order. There were thousands of them, and it took me two whole months.
One of my colleagues was an old man called Jimmy. When I asked him how long he’d worked here, he replied, ‘Just a few months. I’m from a temping agency like you. I’m 66—I retired from my proper job about a year ago. I was working in insurance.’
‘So why did you start this job, just after retiring?’
‘I didn’t like having nothing to do,’ he said. ‘I like keeping myself busy.’...<<<Read More>>>...
