As you sit bumper to bumper in Auckland traffic, cursing the slow crawl into work, be thankful. It's actually doing you a lot of good. According to The Psychological Benefits of Commuting to Work in the Atlantic, the commute doesn't just getus to and from our place of work. The feeling of control in one's own car; the time to plan, to decompress, to make calls, to listen to audiobooks. And it is actually a relatively efficient way of simultaneously facilitating a physical and psychological shift between roles - initiating a sequence in which the feelings and attitudes of home life are deactivated, replaced by thoughts of work. This takes time, and if it doesn't happen, one role can contaminate the other — what researchers call "role spillover".
Freedom of ageing
A fan is struggling with turning 40 and Nick Cave gives him some comfort. He writes: "My advice to you is to grow a porn star moustache and learn the electric guitar — it worked for me — and try to hang in there until you're 60. Then you'll find you don't have to worry about what people say any more and, as a consequence, life becomes a whole lot more interesting. Entering your sixties brings with it a warm and fuzzy feeling of freedom through redundancy, through obsolescence, through living outside of the conversation and forever existing on the wrong end of the stick. What a relief it is to be that mad, embarrassing uncle in the corner of the room, a product of his age, with his loopy ideas about free speech and freedom of expression, with his love of beauty, of humour, chaos, provocation and outrage, of conversation and debate, his adoration of art without dogma, his impatience with the morally obvious, his belief in universal compassion, forgiveness and mercy, in nuance and the shadows, in neutrality and in humanity — ah, beautiful humanity — and in God too, who he thanks for letting him, in these dementing times, be old."
