This is a sight my eyes are met with about five days a week. Five days a week during the university semester, that is. Each day, after my lectures and practicals about neuroscience, cognition, human physiology and statistics are all finished, I head home by bus. It's a simple enough act, commuting. But this is quite a valuable time for me, because it is on the bus, in the silent company of strangers, that I do a lot of thinking and contemplation. I've always been a quiet and introspective person, and people often interrupt me when I'm lost deep in thought. But on the bus, during the times when I'm not accompanied by friends, I don't get interrupted. It's a good half-hour of guaranteed time usually given over entirely to my own musing.

I don't profess to being much good at waxing philosophical for the benefit of others; I'm no philosopher, and I don't really plan to write down my thoughts in the belief that they will somehow guide other people in their lives. The conclusions I arrive at wouldn't have much bearing on the lives of many people, but they certainly have bearing on my own life. My unassuming travel time is the time when I've thought deeply enough about the purpose of existence, how to justify one's existence, and the reasons why I have in life obtained certain things while not having obtained others. I've built on the theorising of other people, of philosophers and scientists and musicians. I've built on my own previous theorising, and I've built on the theorising of people I know. I've pondered heavy issues and lightweight matters and everything in between. I've thought about the motivations behind prejudice in the world and I've wondered whether my red shoes match my pinstripe pants. In my thoughts, I've had conversations I never intend to have, made speeches I never intend to make, done things I never intend to do. I've contemplated contemplation itself, and have arrived at the decision that although nothing can be changed by contemplation alone, surely it isn't as hazardous as some believe it is, and surely all actions are better planned with its use.

This pedantic cross-sectioning of my life and the world around me and this contemplation of its possibilities is, as I said, valuable to me. I won't say that it is invaluable, because I don't know to what end it will ultimately lead me, nor indeed if performing it is of any real consequence at all. But if nothing else, it allows me to put things into perspective and to make the most of things, because it is within musings that there are no true boundaries, so perhaps it's within our contemplation that we're at our most liberated.

"There was this huge world out there, independent of us human beings and standing before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partly accessible to our inspection and thought. The contemplation of that world beckoned like a liberation." – Albert Einstein.

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