The annual routine to which we become habituated during our years of schooling makes this week a peculiar slice through time for those of us who proceed to careers that aren't directly related to serving students. We learn as children to depart our place of daily occupation prior to Christmas with a sense of "see you next year." Even decades into a career that lumbers through the holiday season like a bear through a rare winter flowerbed, touching down in the final week of December for a few days' work feels a bit like coming to an unexpected hill at the end of a long journey.

It doesn't help, of course, when Christmas and New Year's fall on weekends. Employers that offer those as paid days off tend to shift them a day or two to grant the abbreviated workweeks despite the calendar. But some of us employees labor with no holidays, and nothing so amply affords a lesson in perspective as a rush hour commute without the rush.

The season is apt, in short, for reflections of a broad, empathetic sort.

At such times, one marvels at the brazen perpetuation of democracy in a society so diverse that even some few dozen square miles contain irreconcilable lives. New England, with its proud tradition of town meetings, raises that dogged practice to the status of an organizing principle. In his classic 1942 painting "Freedom of Speech," Norman Rockwell portrays a grubby-handed working man standing among his fellow electors at the annual financial meeting of an unidentified Vermont town. The styles of those around him suggest that they inhabit distinct social strata.

As different as the WWII-era lives of the town banker and the dairy farmer may have been, however, they still bore commonalities that technology has largely erased. Among us, now, are residents who make a daily commute to the Boston metropolis, folks who just cross town or make the short hop of a bridge for work, and others who stay home for international conference calls. Add to the mix those who do not work, whether because retired, disabled, or simply unemployed. Approximately 20,000 people live in this corner of Rhode Island between Massachusetts and the water, about 500 per square mile; by contrast, atlases depicting the United States a century ago use "over 90" as the high end of population density.

Between jobs, six or seven Christmases ago, I took seasonal employment as a driver's helper with UPS, mainly traversing Tiverton. Delivering packages around a town acquaints one with its corners and nooks; it also solidifies the distinction between deep-woods households that regularly transact with QVC and the water-view property to which business documents are daily overnighted.

Similarly, I spent much of this autumn commuting the length of Main Road, from North Tiverton to a construction site in Little Compton, and took the opportunity to get lost a time or two on back roads at the end of the day. Some of the street names that the wandering driver encounters on such excursions register as familiar, perhaps as the addresses given when townsfolk step forward to speak publicly before government bodies.

On a map or a list of voters, addresses have only the color inherent in language. Associating names with their owners' surroundings reminds that those owners are actually people and that the experiences of life can vary hugely even in the smallest civic units.

We all leave the town hall or the high school gymnasium with the shared experience of self governance, but it surely settles in the memory differently depending on the views, the scents, to which we retreat or, as the case may be, grudgingly return. We all read from and write to the same public forums, but the weight or illumination under which we either strain or muse is not always visible in our words.

Still, the contrivances of modern life can be a source of opportunity. After all, a century ago, the trip from North Tiverton to Little Compton mightn't have amounted to a pilgrimage, but neither would it have been a tolerable daily commute. Private, immediate conversations between those in the working-class neighborhoods near Fall River's mills and the country-mouse locales to the south weren't possible, and it surely contributes to a sense of empathy and a sense of community when politically active residents can communicate across miles of road and gulfs of status.

Even from the cold distance of often-anonymous online debate, we may salvage practice in perspective. The person penning missives that seem more heated than the subject matter justifies may do so from a trailer or a mansion, or perhaps from the regular ol' house three doors down.

Moreover, his ire may derive from the prospect of rising sufficiently early to clear the driveway of snow and skid and slide all the way to work come Monday of the holiday season's lost week.