Gayatri Devi remarked that; “Boredom is not a problem to be solved. It’s the last privilege of a free mind. …So lean in to boredom, into that intense experience of time untouched by beauty, pleasure, comfort and all other temporal salubrious sensations. Observe it, how your mind responds to boredom, what you feel and think when you get bored. This form of meta thinking can help you overcome your boredom, and learn about yourself and the world in the process. If meditating on nothing is too hard at the outset, at the very least you can imitate William Wordsworth and let that host of golden daffodils flash upon your inward eye: emotions recollected in tranquility – that is, reflection – can fill empty hours while teaching you, slowly, how to sit and just be in the present. What, much of the world, calls ‘bored’.
Burton (no first name) stated that “Idleness is the bane of body and mind, the nurse of naughtiness, the chief author of all mischief, one of the deadly sins, the cushion upon which the devil chiefly reposes, and a great cause not only of melancholy, but of many other diseases; for the mind is naturally active; and if it is not occupied about some honest business, it rushes into mischief or sinks into melancholy.” I agree with Burton’s assessment of idleness of mind.
I have always had a problem dealing with those ‘seldom times’ when my mind couldn’t busy itself with value thoughts, solving a problem or just enjoying something in life as it flew by me. For one thing, I believe that I have always been a people person. Some are people watchers and I have done my share of that too. But when I say that I think that I am a people person; I mean a person who spends a lot of time thinking about others those in the present, in the past and even those in the future. My good wife, ‘Jo’, has been writing and compiling her ancestral heritage for our children and grandchildren. It is not an easy task for many of them never wrote anything down. Whether because they couldn’t write or just wouldn’t, ‘it is the same’. I was sitting in my lounger bed this morning waiting for my time to get up and go about the things I can still do in my ‘kind of old and feeble’ way. While sitting there (not being bored) I thought of Katie. Who is Katie, you ask? She was a three year old from the past. About ten years ago, Joanne, that’s my wife, had a gnawing question about her family on her father’s side. Ancestors who at one time lived in a mining community in Wales, England and immigrated to another mining town in Colorado, USA. We decided to take a ride over to Colorado to see if we could solve some of her questions. We went through old newspapers, local government, school and cemetery records. After discovering the location of where the father was buried, we went to the cemetery a few blocks away. Not only did we find his grave but a few feet away was the grave of a daughter. A daughter who died when she was only three years old. We had not even known she existed before that. There was a little angel, carved in stone, still sitting on top of her small gravestone. We wondered about how she died and what she was like, etc.
Well, this morning as I sat there in my lounger I thought of Katie, for some strange reason. You may be thinking the same thing that I was. Why would Katie come to my mind; she died well over one hundred years ago. I thought about what she may have looked like had she grown to be a young lady. What would she have been like had she been allowed to tarry, would she have been a happy, friendly person, maybe married to a nice young man and raise a few children of her own. A few tears came to my eyes as I thought of those things.
Boredom is seldom a problem for me because things like that are too quick to enter my mind. Mindlessness, or boredom, is not a problem for a busy mind because it would have to be able to squeeze or force itself in, somehow. A mind that, too often, thinks of things like, well, ‘Katie’ for example, is too busy for ‘bored’. Others, I guess, can sort of ‘lean into boredom’, as Gayatri Devi suggested above.