Boredom is a god bearing many faces.
They inhabit realms we want to escape or find relief from. They hang around crossroads where a change in direction is required, a shift in the paradigm of our thinking, beliefs or feelings.
Sometimes we are living unkindly with ourselves, we have become the pain we are in. In such threadbare conditions we cannot sleep well, struggle to function, find our general engagement with life difficult. The world and ourselves becomes that little bit bleaker. No nostalgic sepia toned photographs, just starkly contrasting black and white. The state of boredom sits as this gremlin, party pooping upon our general joie de vivre.
The landscape of boredom is surrounded by bleak horizons, distracting us from seeing what is directly beneath our feet.
Boredom is a place that, paradoxically, we escape too, it diverts our attention away from even more discomforting feelings. Things not yet fully conscious. These initiate a pause in the progress of our desires, with a bardo where nothing else can happen, everything is frozen unable to move. Boredom has the quality of quicksand, the more you struggle the deeper into it you sink. Frustrating as this may be, there is no point in being angry or pissed off with boredom. That just stokes the fires of it. Be still and let it pass in its own time.
So, in one twist of a moment, we turn around to face boredom once again. That void, always, it seems, worthy of staring deeply into from time to time. When it next happens be more curious about what lies beneath. Boredom might seem just this latest bit of sediment to settle into our conscious awareness. But once you sit with it a while you may detect an aura surrounding it. This isn't a heavenly radiance but the radioactive emanation, agitated, with the toxicity of a dark angel. For you this aura is likely to have a different ombre to mine.
Boredom languishes upon an uncomfortable old mattress sprung with pure panic.
Now, on this occasion my lack of ease arose close to home in the retail environment of our shop. After weeks of reassuringly good trading, in mid May it all went spookily quiet, deathly quiet. Tumbleweed rolled through the frontier seaside town. My response, was inwardly to despair, as though I were awaiting the arrival of doomsday. This was surprising, because I know retail, Ive survived the closure of my own business in 1997, lived through the demise of Windhorse in 2015. Things do come to a halt, I recognise that things reach their end. Sometimes they naturally running out of energy, or the mental proliferation of purpose running ahead stops. Even in this place of seemingly greatest stagnation, movement is already impatient to be present. Though it never ever feels like that.
But that isn't what is going on here at all. These were just a quiet few days in Cottonwood Home, surrounded by weeks where sales have been more than encouraging. Later in the month, one Bank Holiday Sunday, we had our best days take since we opened two years ago. My response then, was also to panic, but this time about being unable to keep up our making to match any continuous uplift in sales. Both these panics were over reactions, unwarranted responses to an event. Panic usually appears when we are overwhelmed by something, of a situation seemingly beyond our ability to control it. Panic bubbles up from underground, it releases the breath of Hades, from a much deeper place than surface conditions might themselves reveal to you.
Beneath this panic of mine lay the cadaver of an old old story. This one goes - everything you attempt will inevitably fail, bound to go wrong because fate decreed this course, fundamentally there is existentially something wrong with you. Boredom disguises my panic over this view reasserting its 'truth'. A self alerting mechanism to failure being near bye, maybe in the next room. It's just waiting to open the door fully so it can walk right in and take over the proceedings. So, that is the usual scenario. Not a great script, rather repetitious and lacking in originality as a film, but frequently being re-released to a cinema near me, none the less.
Boredom is that person wandering in a desert desperate to find the direction of water.
Our usual sense of purpose, direction and meaning comes from the intermittent, illusory notion that we can be in charge and bring whatever we want to our lives. Yet 'Who is it that is saying this?', 'where are they?' 'What planet do they live on?' Can you locate that 'me' , find its source, one you're so confident is the answer to 'who is it that is saying this?' 'Me' can be such a trickster. You know your arse exists even though you've never seen it face on. Even as we look for 'me' it becomes far too embroiled in the shifty nature of its own self regarding views to reveal where they are coming from. Its like looking for water in a desert. Us you say, they come from Us, well describe what Us is, please do? Us is essentially the homeless hobo kicking sand in your face, then running away.
Our creation stories, perform an important function. They self define, however encouraging or crippling the book category we put them under. Were you to step out of your self-definitions what would you step into - a space of meaninglessness, completely emptied of a sense of oneself? Unlikely. Without our self views what would we spiritually be or become? Of course we over identify with what we feel, think or believe. Its impossible, perhaps even undesirable, to fully decouple ourselves from them. They are hard wired. When we simply ask 'who is it that is saying this' it is to non-plusse, not just our thinking or emotions, but our self awareness. Where 'We' can be, seems to us to be a bit of a no brainer, we believe we know, but also don't know. Recognising a self deception is important, even whilst we continue to perpetrate it
Are we tiring of a particular version of ourselves when we become bored ?
Someone once said that in a state of confusion we are in a creative space, a place of possibilities. We all want to be different in some significant way to how we have turned out. So maybe one purpose behind asking the question 'who is it that is saying this?'is to disorient, to kick us off our usual rail track towards a more open ended way of being. Because its an open ended question, not required to even have a definitive answer. There are many answers, like many ways of being. Boredom reveals a vacant space behind the phrase 'Who is it that is saying this?'.
Boredom is emptied of our habitual refuges. Where you travel to from there is the koan of everyday life. Do you return to those refuges or venture out into unknown territory?
As a man now approaching his 64th birthday, the sense of my mortality forms its own particular frame to the discussion about boredom, meaning and purpose. What can the search for such things be for, when the ultimately finite nature of your life is coming into ever closer and sharper focus? Every day you start knitting a jumper you cannot be sure you'll ever get to finish. Any notion of leaving something behind as some sort of sedimentary legacy, is a self conceit - that a life working in retail matters in the greater scheme of things. Mistaking our occupation as actualisation.
Most people see their legacy, their gift to the future as their children. For myself, as a gay man, that sort of genetic legacy, surrogacy and adoption aside, is just not going to happen. A heightened dependence upon sexual identity, career or quite often blind hedonism, are three alternative ways of filling in the blank spaces around meaning and purpose in anyone's CV. Self indulgence in such situations tends to win out, lives becoming centred around the self regarding, self satisfaction, self pleasuring, self success, the fun and frolics of the self in what happens day to day. So in a simple quiet day in the shop, the feelings of boredom, of things not quite working out as usual or as expected, can rattle that particular delusional cage. Boredom points us towards the vacuity of our notions, lecturing us on the dementia of all self-made things.
Boredom is a state where memory fails us.
We can no longer remember what it is we are meant to be doing with our lives. Boredom is where a sense of loss is alive, we live and breathe a feeling of bereavement, of grieving over what is lifelessly laid out before you. It is a mental space where we cannot connect with who we believe we were, are, or could be, and this is frightening. Floating in this ocean of forgetfulness, we panic.
Boredom is a bit of a grim reaper.
We can become so desperate when we are bored, to get back, to return, to escape its prison, to be that positive person we once were, perhaps only a moment of a day ago. In boredom a version of you wants to expire, but only for a short while. We feel ourselves to be the product of memory, in both in its movement and in its stasis. If we were to experience our life as an impermanent phenomena, this might more resemble the life of a library book - constantly loaned out, expired, returned, loaned out. Self awareness as a borrowed book.
Boredom as the rehearsal, for being forgotten.
In boredom we find ourselves self forgetting, giving up on our history. History forgets all the time what cannot be re-formulated into the cliches of hagiography or myth. Human history tells us that who we really were ,what we were like when we were alive, will ultimately be forgotten. We will all be forgotten.
Every single piece of human activity and ingenuity, the daily search for , and assertion of, meaning and purpose is another way of writing - Someone Remember Me Please! - into already shifting sands.
Can any of us live calmly and at peace with knowing we will be forgotten?
As soon as we subliminally sense panic, do we become bored ?
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