On Boredom

I pondered over the nature of boredom. What does it mean to be bored? Kids say this all the time.

It seems to me that a person may be bored if he is involved by compulsion in an act which is less to his liking than some other act which is sometime away. A stamping machine operator who is punching out five stampings a minute, or a toll booth ticket collector who is collecting 10 tickets a minute, could be bored out of their minds with rotten monotony. On the other hand, if they are really thankful that they have this job, given the circumstances in their life, perhaps they won't be bored. Goes back to the point about 'liking it relative to another activity'.

Some drivers of boredom could be:

- Monotony

- No activity

- Sensory deprivation

But all of this puzzles me. For example, we drove all the way to Vermont. Early in the morning, I sat on the varendah of our cottage and looked out into the serene mountains. I was doing nothing - somehow that is not construed as boredom!

When someone says, "I am bored" (imagine an interminable train or plane ride), the following thoughts occur to me:

- What if there was to be an accident, say a bridge collapse, and one might be a victim of that? The thought of the fragility of our lives gives a shock of adrenaline into the system. The roses indeed do smell better.

- What if you said, 'hey I don't need to change diapers today!'. i.e. being thankful that you are not stuck in a worse situation.

- What if your worked out that intricate problem that you always wanted to concentrate on? Or the ditty you wanted to write? Or the letter to a friend? It seems to me that we go from one sensory stimulus to another. Why not give that a rest and give the mind a chance to flex its imagination?

- What if you confronted yourself? It seems to me that we could spend our entire lives hiding from ourselves. Why not get to the bottom of our psychologies and motivation. Why did we do that thing we did when we were kids? (smoking, plucking apples from the orchard, whatever).

A wit once remarked, 'don't tell me you are bored. If you cannot stand your own self, why do you want to impose it on me?!'

I don't deny that all of us genuinely can and will say, "I am bored'. On the other hand, it seems to me that the claim, upon examination, has no merit.

Rather, it seems to me that our lives are too rich, suspenseful, fragile, precious, limited, that it should be joyously explored every minute.

At the end of a tenure, as one shuts the coffin lid, one fancies a remark such as, "rats, did not have time to get to that last ditty of Emily Dickinson.'