Posted by Elizabeth

It should come as no shock that I’ve been bored out of my skull lately, an unwelcome accomplice as I play The Waiting Game.  So when I read an essay called Our Boredom, Ourselves, tucked at the back of last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I was immediately captivated.  The author examines the idea of boredom in literature and literary pursuits, but goes a step beyond to consider the history, definitions, and uses of boredom (I was relieved to learn that boredom is, in fact, useful, and even good for us).  And all of this got me thinking about why I’m bored, and how I can use the boredom to work through this current phase of ennui.

First, let me admit that I feel a certain amount of guilt and shame every time I write about being bored.  I imagine you, dear reader, hunched over your computer screen, rolling your eyes at my bourgeois problem.  “How much more stupid does a problem get than being bored? Doesn’t boredom imply that you have free time to do whatever you’d like?  Sounds fabulous to me!”  And to some extent it’s true.  In Schuessler’s article, she notes that boredom is a relatively new aspect of the human condition, “a luxury – and a peril – born of the Industrial Revolution, reflecting the rise of individualism, leisure and the idea of happiness as a right and daunting personality responsibility.”  It’s true: boredom feels trivial, a problem reserved for those of us who are lucky enough to have met all of our basic needs and spend our days fretting over self-actualization.  And yet, when you’re in the midst of boredom, there is no worse feeling in the world.  Free time feels anything but free, a dull procession of minutes that marches by in a never-ending parade.

So why is it, I wonder, that free time feels free when you’re busy, and a jail cell when you’re bored?   How can idle time be transformed as quickly as Jekyll and Hyde, depending on your state of mind?  I turn to a definition of boredom by Saul Bellow which captures the potential anguish of what can be easily dismissed as a trifling emotion, “a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents,…accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities.”  When I am busy and productive, free time feels free because that time is specifically reserved for leisure.  Knowing I am using my potential as a human being in other spheres of my life, I don’t feel the pressure to make the most of my free time.  In other words, I don’t feel like a total schlup when I spend an entire morning reading the New York Times. But when all of my time is free, when I’m not working towards any meaningful life project, I am constantly reminded of my “unused powers” and “wasted possibilities.”  Then I feel like a total schlup, because it’s difficult to enjoy much of anything when that activity feels like a sheer distraction from bigger concerns.

And yet, I realize that boredom – even small bouts of it – is a normal part of post-Industrial life.  Much like I believe that doing nothing often accomplishes more than doing something, so, too, does boredom have utility in our lives.  It is not something to be avoided or glossed over, but something we can work through and learn from.  We need fallow periods of our life:  to promote creativity, to give our brains times to think and rest and come up with answers that are difficult to produce when we are racing around at a hundred miles a minute.  According to Schuessler, studies in neuroscience have shown that, even when we are consciously engaged in the act of doing nothing, our brains are quite active.  Doing nothing is doing something.  But when we fear and actively avoid that fallow time – as I have for the past month – spending it focused on mindless distractions and time-killers, I think we’ve eradicated any useful qualities that boredom has to offer us.

So what does boredom have to doing with living a life in pencil?  It’s easy to equate life in pencil with change, and, as an avowed change-a-holic, with change comes excitement and novelty.  Always in search of the next adventure, I’ve struggled with avoiding boredom my entire life.  But life in pencil is just as much about living in the moment, and sometimes those moments aren’t particularly full, interesting, or exciting.  Therefore, to truly live one’s life in pencil, we must go into the boredom, even if we don’t really want to, because, according to author David Foster Wallace, bliss is the shadow side of boredom:

Bliss – a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom…Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you.  Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color.  Like water after days in the desert.  Instant bliss in every atom.

In order to understand bliss, we have to feel boredom.  Pure and simple.  And I know that, when I come out on the other side of this period of boredom, I’m going to feel just that.  Although I’ve been using reading as my primary weapon to combat my boredom (growing up, when I moaned I was bored, my mom would always respond with, “Read a book!”), I couldn’t help but laugh when Schuessler aptly notes that, while we often use reading to avoid boredom, nothing carries a greater risk of active boredom than picking up a book!  Clearly, there is no escaping boredom when you’re in that phase.

One part of The Waiting Game was supposed to end yesterday (and I know there are some readers out there who are on pins and needles, waiting to find out what this Game is).  But it didn’t.  And all I could think was, “I haven’t learned my lesson about boredom yet.”  I’ve decided to take LiP Reader Terry’s straightforward yet profound advice:  I’m simply going to stop waiting.  It’s the only way out at this point.  And I promise to tell you soon, dear readers, what all this Waiting is about.  But now, for some more boredom.

What lessons do you think we have to learn from being bored?  Is it a necessary part of the human condition, or a post-Industrial problem?  Should we go into boredom or try to avoid it altogether?  Anybody want to make any guesses what this Waiting Game involves?