I mean, most of the day, not sure what to do, stuck in the silence, really bored?
When I was a child, I was bored on a regular basis. But my mother, strangely, never seemed to be nearly as bored as my younger brother and I. Perhaps all that opportunity for boredom was a gift I didn’t fully appreciate at such a young age.
As an adult, I can barely remember what boredom feels like. I mean, I might get a little impatient while waiting at the doctors office or when waiting ninety minutes while getting my car oil changed. But that seems different.
What is boredom anyway?
The definition I found that feels most accurate is: a lack of stimulation that leaves one craving relief. In a culture that is fed a constant stream of stimulation, from our food (over processed with excess salt and sugar), to our constant stream of media, we have so much stimulation at our finger tips it's no wonder that boredom is a feeling we have no capacity to understand.
Being bored is such a completely unfamiliar experience that we don't know how to process it and immediately label it as a "bad" thing.
According to Neuroscientist Alicia Walf, a researcher in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, it’s critical for brain health to let yourself be bored from time to time.
Boredom can improve your mental health, creative thinking, and intrinsic motivation. Boredom encourages you to re-evaluate your goals and to make important changes in your life. Additionally, your ability to handle boredom (working through it rather than acting out in negative ways) is an indicator of your ability to focus and to self-regulate.
So let's shift perspective and think of boredom as a positive experience, with positive benefits.
But how do we make ourselves be bored? And now do I need to add “spend time being bored” to my daily to-do list because of all those benefits???
I think the Italians have the right saying for boredom– “il dolce far niente” or the sweetness of doing nothing at all.
The word “sweetness” here is so important. It’s not that we should be creating spaces of boredom for all of its many benefits. That is just more of the same to-do list busyness, or it’s some strange Catch-22, or an Alanis Morissette song line.
We should be feeling boredom because doing nothing is simply sweet.
I don’t even think we should allow ourselves time for boredom so that we can be more productive or creative later. We need to have moments of complete non-productivity for its own sake. We need that spaciousness in our thinking minds and in our bodies, just because we need it.
We need moments of emptiness and silence that only come when we are truly in the do-no-thing space of boredom. We need moments of not achieving, not striving, not needing something more to prove that I am important, or valuable, of not having a goal.
According to ALL of Yoga and mindfulness practices, across all traditions, Doing no-thing is the most supreme experience.
Boredom is an appreciation of what simply is, here and now.
Boredom is sitting with what is.
And the truth is, I do have a moments of boredom each day. It just feels different now as an adult than when I was a kid. It feels slower, and actually a LOT sweeter because I can appreciate it more.
When I sit with my morning brew and I choose to look out the window instead of scrolling on a screen, I'm being bored. When I go for a walk and decide to pause and sit on a log and look at a mushroom, without even trying to identify it and to know it, I'm being bored. When I sit with our kitten Schmendrick and listen to his soft purr, I am in the state of non-achieving and non-doing. It's kinda boring, but oh, so sweet.
Sometimes people say things like Meditation and Shavanasa, the ending rest position of yoga, are just too boring. But when you really let yourself get into that space of meditation or that final resting posture, you feel and you know, that it is the very sweetest one.
Fully resting is the sweetness of adult boredom.
With Boredom and Sweetness,
Angie 🖤
"People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day." ~Winnie The Pooh, and the author A.A. Milne
"To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring – it was peace." ~Writer Milan Kundera
"Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away." ~The philosopher Walter Benjamin