Boredom

💡 How my body works: I will have an unconscious drive to doing something and I don’t get it. It is only later on where I have hindsight reflection or insights where I understand why my body wanted me to do that activity.

For a couple of weeks now, I kept wanting to do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Very specifically: to be bored.

Photo by Jonathan Mabey on Unsplash

This is strange, because all my life, I am constantly making sure that I am not bored. I am always entertained, defining my goals and working towards my goals. I love that life. And in that phase of my life, yes, it is what I needed.

I feel like I’m moving towards a new phase in life. A phase where I am levelling up, where I reprioritise my activities and where I reflect upon my intentions. What worked for me does not always work now, which is fine because I am in a new phase in life. That being said, I needed to figure out what this means.

And the answer is: boredom.

Boredom is so important, because it allows me to be with my thoughts. Different from meditation, where I am in the present without thoughts, I entertain my thoughts or I simply be. The calm, the peace, the quiet allows for an empty space to exist.

Through the empty space do I start to be creative and think about what this new phase is life going to be about. I have some ideas, of course. I have many plans and permutation of plans. But I also want to be creative and explore what is outside of my boundary of plans. Turns out, boredom was the answer.

I don’t have personal social media, and the closest I have to that is using reddit, but not having a reddit account. I do notice myself going to reddit to scroll through the news and comments of what is going on in the world. I really don’t like that. So I would be quite annoyed at myself when I noticed myself doing reddit-scrolling. Now that I understand the intention behind my annoyance — boredom — I have a better control of my action and embrace boredom.

For some period before covid, where I didn’t necessary need to use my phone all the time, I would turn my phone off or go for walks outside without my phone. It allowed me to be bored during my walks and it helped to create space in my head and be creative in new ways.

I understand the intention now. Boredom and slowness. I’m excited for the now, and later, this new phase to appear.

Love,

L