In Reluctant Praise of Boredom

Lately, I’ll admit that I’ve been feeling bored. Work at my ministry site repeats itself day after day, so does life at the Casa. It is still not quite Spring. My student life of last year could usually be relied upon to supply a break in the mundane: a last minute paper, a club’s event, a new cafe to spend the days. But now I know reliably where I’ll spend my days and who will be at dinner when I return home. Part of me is restless, looking to fill the days with something new. 

None of this is to disparage my life this year or the people I share it with; it is a fact of life that human beings become bored. I do not actually want to change anything about the architecture of my life. There is one change I want to make, though: I want to see boredom in a new way. I want to embrace it, to use it if I can. 

The first step is to interrogate this feeling I have, and the idea of boredom itself. What is boredom? First of all, “to bore” is to make a hole. The word “boredom” seems to have some etymological roots in the notion of moving forward slowly and persistently, as a boring tool does. Unpleasant, yes. But we need holes; they are places to break through from one side to another, or to connect two disparate elements. Often when I feel bored, walking to work, cooking, or scanning letters, my first instinct is to put a stop to the feeling as soon as possible with music, a movie, anything but silence, but I think this can be the wrong approach. Moments of boredom force us to be creative. These moments can allow us to befriend our own thoughts, to make peace with being in our own company. This boredom is a prompt for me not to entirely change my life but to go deeper, to experience it more fully as it is, to uncover what is there. It is not something to shrink from, or to grow frustrated with.

I know I will look back at this time in DC and be shocked at how quickly it passed. I know this because it is how I have looked back at every other period of my life thus far. During one of my walks home this week, while I struggled without having music or a podcast to listen to, I remembered a quote I’d read in a book once. The quote is this: 

“Question: how can one manage not to lose time? Answer: experience it at its full length. Means: spend days in the dentist’s waiting room on an uncomfortable chair; live on one’s balcony on a Sunday afternoon; listen to lectures in a language that one does not understand, choose the most roundabout and least convenient routes on the railway (and, naturally, travel standing up); queue at the box-office for theatres and so on and not take one’s seat; etc.”

Camus, “The Plague”

I am not necessarily encouraging any of these activities. But there is something to this idea of boredom and time, and the way they relate and bend each other. 

When I really reflect, no two days have been the same this year, despite the routine. I do not want my time to rush by in a blur, unremarked or unstudied. So I am attempting to make peace with this feeling of boredom, to experience my time in its full length, because I know just how quickly the days can fly by otherwise. 

Question for Reflection: Think of some ways that you can be creative during moments of boredom. How can you implement those ideas into your daily routine?