The Mystery Box of Boredom
The difference between boredom and tranquility is the difference between loneliness and solitude.
Last week, I went on a solo meditation retreat in the mountains. After the initial flurry of unpacking and phoning home, it didn't take long for intense boredom to set in - with the walls of the AirBnB, with the darkness of the night, with my own poor company.
I'd removed all entertaining apps from my iPhone. That didn't stop me from checking email or the weather, the remaining two that I allowed myself. You wouldn't think that the forecast could change every half hour. It doesn't.
I can only meditate for so long. In between sessions, I didn't know what to do with myself, but I was relieved to be rid of the usual swarm of distracting digital gnats around my head. There was also some terror. What is here in this empty apartment, this empty self? I liked hearing the winter wind howling against the walls; it filled the emptiness.
Boredom can be a sedative. It's gooey, like rubber cement affixing you to the floor. It's the inability to make time pass.
Boredom is waiting. It's an empty vessel that contains all promises. It's a springboard. It holds the potential for trouble or delight. It's a child stalking from room to room, yelling, "I AM DYING OF BOREDOM!"
The misery of boredom begs creativity to step in and save the day.
I used to be a court reporter. We traveled around the Southeast transcribing depositions and hearings. Once, we were at an Army installation in Huntsville, Alabama. Something had gone wrong with the arrangements, and the five of us waited for hours in an empty classroom. The only book in the room was a dictionary, so Dictionary was what we played.
tragopan: In eighteenth-century England, the idiom for a theatrical form that combined tragedy and panorama, the result of technical advances in set design.
One person reads aloud an obscure word from the dictionary, and everyone else makes up a definition and writes it down on a piece of paper, folds it, and hands it to the reader.
tragopan: A shallow rectangular pan used in Italian cuisine. Contraction of tiramisu and ragu.
Then the person reads aloud each definition, including the real one, and the rest of the group guesses which one is true.
tragopan: An Asian pheasant. The male has brightly colored plumage and two hornlike appendages on the head.
We were punchy with boredom.
tragopan: Term used by literary critics for a work of art so bad it's a tragedy.
At my retreat in the mountains, I relied on my cradle of practice: a schedule of meditation, contemplation, exercise, making meals, cleaning up, that occupied most of the time but not all of it. I had removed my structure of little habits and stuff I was responsible for as a person in a house, in a relationship, in a family, in a community.
I gradually grew less resistant to nothing going on. Boredom opened the way to seeing. After lunch, I simply stood and gazed out the kitchen window.
I watched the shadows of clouds move across the ground and the pale trunks.
I noticed a faint path disappearing into a rhododendron grove. The white froth of a little brook fluttered down at the bottom of the hill. It was so far away, it would be visible only when the leaves were off the trees, and only if there were enough time to pay that much attention. I spent over an hour one afternoon sketching a single long branch.
On my last morning in the mountains, I stepped out onto the porch at first light. The dark expanse of woods and hills surrounded me. The wind was blowing again. Being silent and alone didn't necessarily prevent the noisy chatter in my head, but the silver wind blew some of that away. I reflected that the difference between boredom and tranquility is the difference between loneliness and solitude.
Elegy Whenever my father was left with nothing to do — waiting for someone to 'get ready', or facing the gap between graduate seminars and dull after-suppers in his study grading papers or writing a review — he played the piano. I think of him packing his lifespan carefully, like a good leather briefcase, each irritating chore wrapped in floating passages for the left hand and right hand by Chopin or difficult Schumann; nothing inside it ever rattled loose. Not rationalism, though you could cut your tongue on the blade of his reasonable logic. Only at the piano did he become the bowed, reverent, wholly absorbed Romantic. The theme of his heroic, unfinished piano sonata could have been Brahms. Boredom, or what he disapproved of as 'sitting around with your mouth open' oddly pursued him. He had small stamina. Whenever he succumbed to bouts of winter bronchitis, the house sank a little into its snowed-up garden, missing its musical swim-bladder None of this suggests how natural he was. For years I thought fathers played the piano just as dogs barked and babies grew... From "Elegy," by Anne Stevenson
Beautiful! Thanks.
beautiful poem and wonderful insight. thank you