The Longest Summer

The summer I was twenty-two I worked in a warehouse on the edge of a city I had not chosen, sorting returned goods for eight hours a day. The work required almost no thought. You picked up the item, checked it against the manifest, placed it in one of several bins, moved to the next. The rhythm became, after the first week, entirely automatic — the hands worked, the eyes worked, the mind was elsewhere.

I had expected to find this intolerable. I had been, until then, a person who regarded boredom as a crisis, who needed the mind continuously occupied, who had spent most of my education acquiring the conviction that manual repetitive labour was something to be escaped rather than inhabited. The warehouse was, in this sense, an experiment I had not consented to.

What happened instead is not entirely easy to explain.

The first two weeks were as difficult as expected. The mind, denied its usual inputs, thrashed. I thought about everything I should be doing, everything the summer was supposed to contain, every more interesting version of this period I could imagine. I was present in the warehouse in the most grudging possible way — doing the minimum required, counting the hours, leaving the moment the shift ended.

Then something shifted.

It happened gradually, over the third and fourth weeks. The resistance wore down, not because I stopped wanting other things, but because the resistance was more exhausting than the work itself. The work was simply the work. It was there, in front of me, neither good nor bad, requiring what it required and nothing more. I had been assigning it a meaning — this is beneath me, this is not what I am — and the assignment was the problem, not the work.

When I stopped assigning meaning to it, I was left with the work itself, which was actually fine. The hands found a rhythm. The body settled into the repetition. And the mind, released from the task of arguing with the situation, went somewhere I had not expected.

It went quiet. Not empty — I was still thinking, still noticing, still a mind moving through experience. But the quality of the thinking was different. It was slower. Less purposeful. The thoughts that arose were not the thoughts I had decided to have but the ones that came when I stopped directing traffic — old memories, unresolved questions, images that surfaced without explanation. Things I had been too busy, in the previous years, to pay attention to.

I began to understand, that summer, the difference between thinking and processing. Most of what passes for thinking is processing — the handling of immediate inputs, the management of the day's requirements, the response to the continuous low-level stimulus that a connected life provides. Processing is necessary but it crowds out the other kind of thinking: the slow, undirected variety that does not respond to demand. The variety that comes only when the processing has been suspended.

The warehouse suspended my processing. For eight hours a day, my hands were busy and my mind was free, and the freedom turned out to be more valuable than I had expected.

I wrote, in the evenings that summer, more than I had written in the preceding two years. Not because I was inspired in the conventional sense — I had no particular subject, no burning idea demanding expression. But because the slow mind had been accumulating things during the day, and the evenings gave them a way out. The writing was different too: less clever, less performed, more honest. As though the warehouse had stripped some protective coating from the process.

I have since found ways to recover something of this condition without returning to warehouse work. Long walks without a phone. Tasks that engage the hands without engaging the head. The kind of reading that does not feel like work. But I am honest enough to admit that none of these replicate the specific quality of that summer — the full eight hours, the complete suspension of the directed mind, the enforced availability to whatever arose.

I don't romanticise repetitive labour. I know that for many people it is not an experiment but a permanent condition, and that permanent conditions do not produce the same quality of liberation that temporary ones do. The value I found in the warehouse was partly a function of having chosen it, or at least of knowing that I could leave.

But I think about the summer often. I think about what it taught me about the mind's need for fallow time — for periods of uncultivated quiet in which the slow thoughts can do their work without interference. I had been, until then, a person who feared fallow time. I understand now that I had been fearing the wrong thing.