Always waiting...

I write this while getting back home on the tube after work. Since starting my job in September I spend approximately three hours on the tube every weekday. Most days, this doesn't bother me. I listen to music, catch up on reading (currently The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing, not my favourite book but I have to admit it's fantastically written), catch up on work reading (this is an entirely different thing from reading as anyone who studies or works in a science related field can tell you) or write. I do some of my best writing in the tube, probably because it opens me up to different types of people that I might not see otherwise during my average day. Sometimes, however, I find myself reading Metro, tapping my foot annoyed at the content, or doing nothing at all. It's these moments that I start thinking, and I get worried.

Life is short, or so they say, and I like to think that I'm taking advantage of my time, but the truth is that I spend countless hours just sitting, doing nothing much. Procrastinating. It's one thing to procrastinate from work (during exam time I've been known to produce 20000 words of fiction in one day, just to avoid revising), but it's a completely different thing to procrastinate from life. Of course, sometimes you need a break, I completely get that. Five minutes to see what friends have been up to on Facebook, or skimming through Metro in the morning, especially if you've had little sleep and concentrating on anything more complex than footballers' love lives seems impossible. The problem is the amount of time I spend sitting on my desk refreshing Facebook even though I know there's going to be nothing new since I last refreshed it five seconds ago, or reading Metro cover to cover. Or just the time that I spend sitting on the tube staring blankly out of the window. It's depressing. Especially when I think of the amount of time I already spend on useful but "non-constructive" tasks, such as changing clothes, putting shoes on (I hate the amount of time I spend putting shoes on and off, I were there were an all purpose shoe), paying the bills, checking my internet allowance... Small things that I worry about but that all in all don't have an impact on my happiness. Wouldn't this time be better spent hanging out with friends, or listening to music, or playing?

I try to minimise wasted time commuting by reading, listening to music, and lately, writing. It's more productive than sitting on the tube staring blankly at the person in front of you. Yet so many people seem to sit for hours in the tube staring blankly at each other. I wonder if they just never think of the amount of time they're wasting? Or have they just come to the conclusion I refuse to think about: that it doesn't matter what we do in the tube, or at work, or in our lives, because we're all mortals, and death is the same for all of us? I hope they haven't. It would make the world a darker place. And it follows that if life and what you do with it doesn't matter, then why live at all? No, I'd rather not think about it. I may privately believe that life has no point, but come on! It can be so much fun, it has to be worth making the most of it.