For the last few years my workspace has been St Paul's Cathedral. There, one's mental pulse falls in line with a rhythm set by the choir and the liturgy. Thoughts emerge and fade without being pegged to any urgent or practical agenda.
What a contrast with my new workplace: this newspaper. I am having to adjust to a different pace. Here, the speed of one's mental processes are set by the background noise of a thousand fingers tapping at keyboards, and the sort of reflection made possible by St Paul's can feel like so much wasteful daydreaming. The information that floods into a newsroom describes the world in complex detail. New reports. Latest casualty figures. Another speech to examine. Forget all that airy-fairy reflection. This is reality.
And there's the rub. At St Paul's, the silence and space allowed one to develop an acute sensitivity to what is going on. Here, such sensitivity would make your head explode. So you shut down, put on headphones to block out the hubbub. But that risks a much narrower view of the world. So the question is: how to remain porous to its complexities without suffering an overload that closes down the imagination?
This is an extract from Thinking Aloud with Giles Fraser, a new weekly audio podcast. Listen to the first one and post comments here
