I was catching up with a school friend with whom I had not spoken for around thirty years. We’d arranged to have the conversation earlier in the week and I was keenly anticipating his call. I am curious about people and how their lives unfold, the successes and disappointments, how they settle down or don’t, how they find peace with themselves and the world around them. Some do, some don’t, and it is particularly interesting to pick up the thread of someone’s life when I had last put it down so many years before.
I also enjoy doing this because it allows me to look at my own life. How have I found peace? How do I consider the way my life has turned out? What have been my defining moments and what characterises the way I live? And, perhaps less comfortably, how have I invented my story?
Our conversation inevitably turned to work and I explained how easily bored I can be if variety is not available. To illustrate this I used a personal image that seemed to emerge, like a pocket of gas erupting from deep beneath the surface of the planet, unexpected. I told my friend that I stopped working for a regular client because I got bored with the tube journey to their offices.
Now, this is not true. I have never left a job or resigned a client because I was bored with the journey. In this specific case I resigned the client because I was fed up with the work I was doing for them. It had become monotonous and I had stopped learning from it. Not only that, the truth is I enjoyed the journey to and from this particular client because I was able to cycle. It was the only thing about working for this client that I actually did like.
On the other hand, it is entirely true. So often have I found myself contemplating the journey to work with a deep sigh. The idea of making the same journey, day in, day out, fills me with a kind of dread. In the past I have found new routes to the same place simply in order to stave off the feeling of being a programmed robot, carrying out a set of digital instructions that take me from one place to another, in exactly the same way, at exactly the same time, without fail or variation, five days a week. The journey represents the whole experience, not just the travel.
Until this conversation yesterday I didn’t realise how powerful a metaphor for my need to avoid boredom this was. So powerful that after only a few months I had associated my dissatisfaction with the organisation with the notion of travelling to and from their offices.
And yet, I think it goes even deeper than this. What is behind my tendency to perpetrate these distortions? What was wrong with the actual truth that a more dramatic “truth” is required that illustrates the point so graphically? I sometimes feel I live a rather dull and uninteresting life. One that I wouldn’t particularly wish to sit and listen about. These little embellishments, half-truths, white lies or what a college friend used to refer to as “simple use of hyperbole” somehow enable me to feel that I am more interesting that I really am. I do, after all, want my companion to go away from the encounter feeling that they haven’t wasted their time on me.
Nick Gendler 