hello, boredom, my old friend . . .
Now that Christmas has passed, the new year is here, the kids are back in school, and I am back to work but not yet back to school, my days are no longer so crammed as they were when I was working on my capstone, just full—and I am a little bit bored. Why should I write, or read, or expend energy to do anything at all that isn’t necessary? So I have been spending too much time playing sudoku while listening on the British History Podcast to the story of how the House of Wessex came to its end. Listening to tales of the violent politics and toxic family life of the Anglo-Saxon nobility is what counts for me as rest these days, perhaps. But it is a rest that isn’t really restful, which is to say that it isn’t rest at all.
Boredom protects the individual—this line from an essay by Adam Phillips has come to mind again and again in the last week or so. Protects the individual from what? From some kind of risk, I thought. Last night I reread the essay to find out exactly what that risk might be.
Here is the wonderful opening paragraph of “On Being Bored”:
Children are not oracles, but they ask with persistent regularity the great existential question, “What shall we do now?” Every adult remembers, among many other things, the great ennui of childhood, and every child’s life is punctuated by spells of boredom: that state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.
The great ennui of childhood: yes, I do remember that, and perhaps in a way I dwell in it still, as an adult; perhaps it is the condition of living in a contemporary bourgeois home. It is so quiet here during the day. I wish for . . . what?
Phillips says that “as adults boredom returns us to the scene of inquiry, to the poverty of our curiosity, and the simple question, What does one want to do with one’s time?” But often I experience boredom not as a question—What do I want to do?—but as a rejection—I really don’t want to be doing this. After all, I have a to-do list accounting for plenty of obligations, many of which are (theoretically) things I really do want to do. Meanwhile, I feel bored, or tell myself that I am bored, to protect myself from committing to what I am planning to do or actually doing.
Where is the risk in committing to my activities—to my actual life? Here is the quotation I couldn’t fully recall: “Boredom, I think, protects the individual, makes tolerable for him [sic] the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be.”
But in my planning and doing, I’m not sure what I’m waiting for. Is the problem simply that I don’t know the future, I don’t know where all this effort is taking me, I don’t even know how this essay will end until here it is, right now, I suppose?
