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Once people are aware that I have stopped working, they often enquire “So, what do on earth you do with your time?” Typically, the emphasis is on the second “do” and the gist of the enquiry, whilst subtle, is distinctly pejorative. The other common accusation which crops up when I am explaining some slightly arcane enterprise I have embarked upon is “You have too much time on your hands” as though the person posing the question was in some way qualified as an official arbiter of personal time allocation, or worse, they felt their time was in some more valuably spent. My general feeling when these queries, or observations, are made, is to think to myself “B.o.l.l.o.c.k.s to you, you’re just jealous” and then I ignore it. Occasionally, I do respond more fully. Recently, someone did press me when I tried ignoring them, so I gave a truthful answer and said “Well, I spend a lot of time thinking”. Not put off, they persisted further by asking “And WHAT exactly do you think about?”, which was delivered with a slightly contemptuous smirk. The answer I gave (also truthfully) on this occasion was that I had been thinking about the relationship between my own personal consciousness and the physical nature of the universe, in particular how all things physical could easily be a pure manifestation of my individual consciousness and they could not, it seems, be satisfactorily proven beyond all doubt to be anything else. That is, “matter” may not be anything more "real" than my thoughts themselves. I added that I did not necessarily consider this to be true, but I did consider it to be one of a number of equally valid possibilities. This, kind of, shut them up, but, after a couple of seconds, an annoying and very typical riposte to my positing was issued by my inquisitor: “You can think too much, you know. As far as I’m concerned, that is a shoe”, he said, pointing at his shoe, “and this is certainly just a glass”, offering his drink up for examination. I found the temptation to continue the exchange irresistible: “Presumably, you personally decided long ago that you’d simply thought ‘enough’ and could think no more and, by the way”, I added, as I pointed at his shoe, “when you routinely start concluding that ANYthing is JUST a thing, then it’s likely your imagination has hit the buffers and you should probably look at one more thing, then drop dead”. He seemed in every way perplexed by my comments (the drop dead suggestion, by the way, was frequently used by my father as a way of perplexing bothersome people to the point whereby they retire from your company, and I must say, it works very well) . I looked at my own glass, and then executed a sharp exit to the kitchen for a top-up of finest red Burgundy (which I had brought). Another provocative response which you can use when faced with that impertinent question “what do you do with your time?”is to immediately turn it around with “well, first, tell me what YOU do with your time” importantly adding “and I need to know the answer, IN FULL DETAIL”. This last element has the curious effect of reducing all experiences to a very long series of sub experiences, which may be stripped of any automatic or absolute interest value which has been falsely ascribed to it, simply by virtue of it being associated in a collective sense with some activity deemed generically interesting or exciting. Let me give examples using a couple of anecdotes. I remember once listening to the racing driver Jackie Stewart describing how one his most abiding recollections of his career was a sensation he experienced whilst leading the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. He said that as he took the final bend, he suddenly caught an intense whiff of new mown grass which awakened in him a deep memory of being at home at his parents farm in Scotland as a child. So, in what would have been only a micro second, deep emotions were stirred and, more importantly, they were very much divorced from the generic experience of driving in and, in fact, the ostensibly amazing experience of winning the British Grand Prix. Subsequently, I heard a comment Bill Wyman, the Stones bassist, made about what it was like being a member of the band. He said simply that in his memory, his career seemed to comprise of forever waiting in a hotel lobby for a bus or limo to take him somewhere else (usually another hotel lobby). He said he barely recalled actually being on stage and he alleviated the true boredom of it all by a process of constant and deliberate absorption within the moment, examining the minutia of life (much of which resulted in his phenomenal collection of Rolling Stones memorabilia, which, incidentally, included such mundane items as bus tickets, hotel bills and so on). So there are a variety of takes one can offer when addressing the question of what one does with one’s time. Perhaps my own descriptions and the two anecdotes illustrate that we are not constrained by any loose description of what our generic function is or what ostensible task we have set about completing. More, there exists and infinite string of moments which we can delight in examining or marvelling at, or, of course, we can just revert to those meaningless descriptors of time absorption methodologies one hears every day such as “Oh, I’m a solicitor” or “I work out what the government should do next”. Anyway the picture above (courtesy Sair) shows me deep in reflective contemplation, after having done one of the things I regularly do with my time, namely make, and then consume, spicy soup. This happens at least once and often twice a week (pretty well always with Sair) and I would say that if there was such a thing as spirit, or soul, (which there isn’t, btw), then spicy soup making would be good for it because whilst making soup, one can take one’s time to fly around and around and in and out of one’s very own mental universe (and, as I have demonstrated, that could well be the only universe that does, in fact, exist at all).
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Brian You've definitely got too much time on your hands.