Busyness has become a badge of honour in modern life, a reassurance that we’re “keeping up”. How often do we find ourselves dropping the word into casual conversation, usually in response to the question: “How have you been?”
Robert Dessaix, in his book The Pleasures of Leisure, wonders what happened to empty time. “We row frantically like galley slaves towards retirement, and then, having arrived and freed from the lash, we find that instead of all the time in the world, we’re staring into infinite nothingness,” he writes.
But the “infinite nothingness” isn’t exclusive to retirement; there are moments of it every day
