At this point I had two options. I could either find ways of occupying my time by giving into my cravings or fight it and overcome myself through discipline. I decided for the latter. As time slowed down and I was faced with empty days, questions that kept coming back to me was, how will I use the time I have right now instead? How do I embrace and learn contentment with unproductive time? It was no less a reorienting of both what I valued and the rhythm of how I lived.
Instead of compulsively checking my phone and emails and messages I found myself sketching and reading and writing and cooking regardless of how productive and successful these attempts were at the end of the day. The earlier frustration and boredom slowly gave way to calm towards the end of the week. In the silence there was just the slow plodding of living each day in silence, obedience and dare I say it… joy? What was important was just being before God and trusting him to provide and guide my activities for everyday. After all, wasn’t it Jesus who said that man would not live on bread alone but on every word of God?
What I think I’ve really been learning is that boredom is essential to being human. It’s just something we have to get through use our time well and create things out of love whilst developing a deeper self knowledge. Don’t get me wrong. The boredom was scary. It was scary how quickly my mind jumped to the mindless scroll of entertainment on my shiny little iPad. It wasn’t even a thought but an impulse that just led me on. I just couldn’t stand being bored! It was like a restless itch that you just had to scratch on your back. Though Pascal had been gone for nigh 400 years, his saying that much evil was done from man’s inability to sit by himself in his room still rang true with me.
The 19th century philosopher Kierkegaard once thought that the ideal human being was someone who could sit silently before God. He described our human condition as one deeply driven by anxieties like those secret fears that keep us awake at night. We can always drive it out though by delaying sleep at much as possible and by preventing ourselves from ever being alone with our selves. Yet without boredom, we never truly face these anxieties and deal with them. They continue to unconsciously drive our often irrational and erratic behaviors and come out when we least expect it like at a family dinner that erupts into World War 3 from the spillage of one tea cup.
We never truly come to know ourselves and in that way we can never become who we are. And we can never really be saved. To us our problems will always be out there and someone else’s. This makes me wonder…what else do we miss out on because we’re unwilling to be bored?
L’Étranger 