The months before the job

A graduate in Amman has finished her degree and does not start her first job until September. Between now and then is a stretch of open months she has never had before and may not have again.

The obvious plan is rest. Sleep late, see friends, travel a little if she can, arrive at work recharged. Nobody would blame her, and after four years of exams she has earned some of it.

But ask people in their forties which in-between season they still talk about, and it is rarely the one where they rested well. It is the one where they made something. The summer they coached the street's under-twelves side, kept the accounts for an uncle's struggling workshop, or painted the classrooms of a village school with a group of friends. Something with a deadline, and other people relying on it.

Those months stay with them because they were changed by them. Usually not by a lesson, but by finding out what they were like when someone else needed them to turn up.

It is also the cheapest time anyone will ever have to try on a role. No title yet, nobody expecting you to be one kind of person. You can find out whether you like teaching, or selling, or organising, and walk into September with an answer rather than an assumption.

Very little of this needs permission or an application form. It needs someone deciding, before the summer starts, that the gap is not a waiting room.

Most of us have more say over how our time is spent than we let ourselves believe. The months between things are simply where it is easiest to see.