Well, I don’t know what does it for others, but I do know that this is part of what I have in mind when I keep saying that education is for your life and not just for your job. There’s also the entirety of what you have taken in as experience, both direct and vicarious. It’s all yours to be summoned at will.
I have an assortment of mental pockets, storage boxes, trunks, and entire closets full of things I can take out and examine whenever I am trapped in a situation where I can’t just do as I please. I can mentally recite poetry I’ve memorized, search my memory for the names of heroes and villains in books I’ve read, compare plots, and recall entire scenes and stories. I can practice listing the fifty U.S. states in alphabetical order, with capitals, and fill them in on a mental map. For good measure, I’d add the Canadian provinces. I can play songs and instrumentals in my head, recall details of paintings, remember scenes and places I’ve visited. I can practice translating my thoughts into another language. I can conjugate verbs in Latin and German. The entire population of characters I’ve known in my life is there for reanimation, with voices, looks, gestures, and personalities.
When I’m tired of remembering, I can compose limericks, design abstract images, and plot novels, all in my head. I can also stare at something in my environment—wood grain, linoleum, a mottled carpet, a dirty snowbank, a stained ceiling—and see pictures in it. I can make them move. I can see faces.
If there are real faces around me—in church, in a classroom, in a meeting, riding the subway—I’m all set: faces in themselves are amazingly interesting, and the stories that go with them are equally so. If you don’t know them, you make them up.
If I were stuck doing data entry, the data would come alive for me in the form of people, places, and things. I would also set myself little challenges: how many can I do in a minute, in an hour? can I increase that? can I change my system? I would look for patterns. I would look for funny words. I would see them all in color. (This is not to say that I wouldn’t prefer a job that was more engaging and used more of my abilities. But as long as I had it, I would make it entertain me.)
And this all assumes that I am unable to use my time freely: to read, to write, etc. For instance, I’m in a waiting room without a magazine, or I’m recuperating from something and too weak to read. If I have books and paper and writing implements, eyesight and the use of my hands, and some vestige of brainpower, I’m good practically forever.
