The office: Commuting

How quiet the nation was only 45 minutes ago, and yet how much hair-rinsing, necktie-tying, key-searching, stain-removing and spouse-shouting will occur over the next 30, within a gigantic circle drawn around the capital, from Folkestone to Aylesbury, from Haslemere to Chelmsford.

Entering the train carriage feels like interrupting a congregation.

The other passengers neither look up nor give any other overt sign of taking notice, but they betray their awareness of any new arrival by dextrously readjusting their limbs to let us past.

Only if the train crashed would we know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies.

Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

Today there is a story about a man who fell asleep at the wheel of his car after staying up late into the night committing adultery on the internet - and drove off an overpass, killing a family of five in a caravan below.

Such accounts, so obviously demented and catastrophic, are paradoxically consoling, for they help us to feel sane and blessed by comparison.

We can turn away from them and experience a new sense of relief at our predictable commuting routines; we can be grateful for how tightly bound we have kept our desires, and proud of the restraint we have shown in not poisoning our colleagues or entombing our relations under the patio.

At the office, employees are already beginning to course through the plate-glass doors. They have stepped off railway carriages at Victoria and Farringdon, London Bridge and Waterloo.

The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to the painfully free-ranging questions of Sunday evening. Our ten thousand possibilities are reduced to an agreeable handful.

How satisfying it is to be held in check by the assumptions of colleagues, instead of being forced to contemplate all that one might have been and probably never will be.

There's a meeting scheduled with the team for 9.30am, time enough to buy a muffin and coffee from the cafeteria.

The start of the day in the office has burned off nostalgia as the sun evaporates a coat of dew. Life is no longer mysterious, sad, haunting, touching, confusing or melancholy; it is a welcome stage for practical action.

Alain de Botton's latest book is The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.