Contentment

There’s a man in this area, perhaps around forty years old, who collects car numbers. All day every day, rain or shine, he can be seen with his pencil and his notebooks, carefully writing them all down. I stopped and chatted to him today, and he told me he’d been doing this for twenty-four years (“twenty five next year”). On my way home it set me thinking.

Here is a man who it seems is perfectly happy. He appears to have no ambition, apart from more car numbers (and goodness knows, there are plenty of those, even though he must count some of them many times over). He probably gets up every day, looking forward to another day of....collecting car numbers, enjoys what he does, and I’d be surprised if he didn’t sleep well at night. He doesn’t engage easily in conversation, but seems happy to be on his own, and while no doubt he has at some point been labelled as “special needs”, he appears to need very little.

Obviously someone somewhere is paying for his everyday, not so special needs, but somehow here is a man who seems to have it all. I for one could learn a lesson or two from him...