My Fascination With Boredom

Every now and then, and not often enough, I spend a day getting bored. I do nothing. In fact this week I’m spending four days sitting in a room. No artificial lights. No work. No phone. No screens. No reading.

Nothing. 

It’s going to be a small winter solstice hibernation.

I know what will happen. I’ll start to experience the cold turkey of my addiction to busyness.

I’ll reach for my phone that isn’t there. I’ll pace up and down and get restless and bored, painfully bored, and tell myself all sorts of perfectly acceptable reasons why this is a terrible idea.

And then, in time and as it always does, something will shift. Quiet will descend upon me, maybe even bliss.

And then I’ll go outside and it will be as if I saw the world as a child again. I’ll stare at trees for hours, watch animals grazing, be enraptured by the song of birds and delight at the touch of the wind.

I’ll be fascinated in everything, utterly absorbed in the miracle of life and the joy of being alive. And then I’ll ask myself, as I always do, why I don’t do this more often.

Why indeed. There are a hundred excuses within easy reach and none of them compete with the glory of this practice, even when done in small, manageable doses. 

For me it’s a turning towards, in a deeply embodied way, what I habitually run from and swallowing it up whole.

The creeping hypnosis of my modern sedentary and digitalised life promises me MORE, but only delivers distraction, worse still, deadening.

Sometimes the very things we avoid are the very things we need.

I remember in the army on exercise in Poland being so cold that the best way to warm up was to strip off and rub myself with snow, before putting my clothes back on.

To embrace what you avoid is to be given, on a plate, what you were chasing.

To fully renunciate, can be to wholly indulge.

The polarity flips and the most wonderful thing is that ‘we’ don’t do the flip, nature does.

We live in a society that is allergic to boredom and there are powerful forces that profit from our attention. The two, in my view, are very much linked.

Just as the great snake Kaa in The Jungle Book whispers ‘trust in me’, we duly give ourselves to the trance - anything to relieve ourselves from the ever looming threat of our restless boredom.

But in busyness and distraction we are trusting the poison rather than the medicine and that keeps us skimming the surface of life.

I think what we are all yearning for is depth; depth of experience. Boredom and restlessness are misunderstood. They are not superficial experiences, only sometimes challenging and necessary ones. They often, if embraced, form the fertile soil from which deep creativity and insight flowers. 

We all have a capacity to be awed and fascinated by life in any given moment. In a word we could call this capacity presence. It needs to be cultivated and embracing boredom might just be the doorway in for you too. 

Life is lit from within. And so it is inwards, into whatever it is that we find there, that we must go.

I’ll leave you with this, a poem that always brings me back:

The Breeze at Dawn – Rumi

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.