Beautiful Boredom

I've read through my Facebook newsfeed at least 5 times. My friends are all offline. My homework sits but I don't want to start. I've been home alone, listening to Hawaiian falsetto music and making tea. And I feel, perhaps sad, but more like there's something missing. Unsatisfied. Something missing in the balance.

After some contemplation, I realized the feeling I felt. Boredom. When the world is available, but there doesn't seem like anything to do. When you feel bummed, but you don't know why. I don't know if this is the case for other people, but it takes me a long time to realize that I'm bored. Usually, I blame my sour feelings on something else, like not socializing enough, not having enough clothing in my closet, or something else equally as superficial. Eventually though, I figure it out.

Why do people feel bored in a world of nearly infinite opportunities? It's an interesting question. Theoretically, there are so many activities available to an individual, a person could be active from the point of waking to the point of sleep. I had many choices available to me, from homework, to reading, to watching movies and whatever else. Clearly, I was choosing to be inactive, but why would I choose to be inactive if it was making me feel bad? There had to be incentive in this choice.

Why do we choose to be bored?

I think that boredom is healthy in certain doses. Boredom allows us to take time and look at the world without distractions.

It is very easy to become distracted in the sprawl of common living. Our minds become so focused on one activity or another that we forget the big picture. Focusing on one activity is not healthy for the spirit. Any activity that a human does is inherently imperfect because there are too many details for our mind to handle. The further we delve into an activity, the more disappointed we become in our inherent deficiencies. Not only that, but the further we delve, the more we believe we can overcome these impassable deficiencies, which sends us into an obsessive cycle where we fight to fix what can never be fixed. Such a fight is futile, draining and disappointing.

With all the work I've been doing for school, the musical, and whatever else, I've been feeling too tired to fight the battle of mastery and perfection. So instead, I stared at my unkempt kitchen while stewing tea, listening to slap stick guitar. The more I stared at the world around me, the further I became from the sprawl within me. 

I thought, this is my life and it is beautiful. And I no longer felt bad.