Boredom has always been one of my worst enemies. Those long, hot, summer days when I would complain, “I’ve got nothing to do.” Coming to terms with the boredom is not a challenge I face alone. We live in a country, a world consumed by the need for continual distraction. I share my struggles, not as solace for others who are similarly afflicted, but as a recognition that I can live differently.
Photo: RDNE Stock project, Pexels
I have never been one for mundane tasks. I have done them, but reluctantly. I brush my teeth, but it’s never without a question, can I put this off to later? I do the dishes, which I haven’t always done. Just ask my former roommates. I pick-up after myself, but never in what might be considered a timely manner. And I aged my father significantly by not mowing the lawn when asked.
Of course, as I’ve aged, my not having seen to certain mundane tasks has caught up with me. Exercise is certainly one. Ever since seventh grade when I was properly over-weight for an eleven-year-old, and always among the last to finish running laps, exercise was simply too much exertion, and most importantly, I never understood, to what end?
I loved sports, but that never felt like it was exercising, as such. It was play, and I loved to play. I’ve spent hours on baseball fields and as I got older, softball fields. I loved my time on the tennis court. Basketball was OK, but I wasn’t a great shooter, and golf, I infamously stopped playing after a tee shot on the seventh hole landed fifteen 15 yards behind the tee. The perfect last shot.
But walking and jogging and weight lifting, even bike riding, were never for me. I thought it great for others, but it wasn’t my style. Ah, the “but.” Well, actually it wasn’t the butt, but the heart. Two tiny stents later, I was being coerced into exercise.
The last few weeks, I’ve been in pools doing aqua exercises, on a Pilates reformer, with out repentance, and doing Cardio Fit in the very place where the intervention took place. I thought the stents were the extent of the intervention. As usual, I was wrong. “You need to exercise,” I was told. I hate exercise!
Did I listen? Invariably, my first thought in these instances is: “No, thanks. I’d rather die young.” But at 74, I suspect that I missed that one.
I have come to the painful realization, I’m too old to die young.
I have come to the painful realization, I’m too old to die young.
So, I show up to the pool, the Pilates instructor’s space and the medical center’s exercise gym. I admit, I like feeling stronger, but it’s the boredom. As a meditator for the past 30 odd years, I have rarely looked forward to extended meditation sessions. I can usually pull-off 20-30 minutes but long retreats are only done with great reluctance.
In my very first meditation, two-day retreat, the director told a story of a meditator who was attending what it is called a Datun – a 30-day meditation retreat. After 10 days, this woman had had enough, and when the gong was sounded, calling everyone to meditation in the morning, she simply stayed in her bed. A few minutes later, there was a knock at her door. It was her meditation instructor. “It’s time to come meditate.”
“No, I’m not coming. I’m done,” the woman said not stirring from beneath the sheets.
“No, it’s time to come meditate.”
“Maybe, you didn’t hear me, I’m done. No more.”
“Actually, it’s time to come to meditate”
This went on, relentlessly, for a few minutes until the reluctant meditator threw open the door and said, “All right, I’ll come and I’ll sit, but I won’t meditate!”
I hate being bored and meditation is boring. Exercise is boring.
The mundane is boring and tedious and I have never been so laser-focused that boring doesn’t get in the way.
The mundane is boring and tedious and I have never been so laser-focused that boring doesn’t get in the way. The brilliant personal essayist, Phillip Lopate, once wrote a piece he called, Against Joie de Vivre. I’m actually completely up for the Joy of Life. If we could just do away with the monotonous repetition of tedium and stick-to-itness, and solely embrace joyful distraction, I’m fine.
“Oh, grow up!” I hear my younger daughter saying to me. I smiled and said, “I have, which is why I can choose not to do the dreary and the banal.”
So now, here’s the gamble and the corresponding odds. Am I willing to endure the mundane, the dull and dreary routine of exercise, or do I wish to continue living a life without intermittent periods of boredom and exertion? “No pain, no gain.” F**k you, whoever coined that. What are we gaining? More opportunities for more of the same? Dying on a Tuesday instead of a Thursday?
I say this, but I really don’t want my children to freak-out. I also don’t my wife to shake her head at me and give me the look. (She was a teacher for nearly four decades). Among the last several years of her teaching career, she worked with students who were deemed “2E.” Twice exceptional. Brilliant but somewhere on the Spectrum, or with some other mental or physical challenges, ADD, Asynchronistic development, et al.
One attribute of those on the autism spectrum is hyper-focus, the ability to engage in almost obsessive behavior about a specific subject or topic. It was the main clue that wasn’t me. Yes, I’ve written too many books, and was able to focus myself to complete those tasks, but never with the hyper specificity of those who are wholly consumed. I would have accomplished I lot more if I were more focused. But then that is at the root of my dislike of the mundane and its attendant boredom.
Now, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche tells his students, of which I am one, that boredom is “part of the discipline of meditation practice. This type of boredom is cool boredom, refreshing boredom. Boredom is necessary and you have to work with it. It is constantly very sane and solid, and very boring at the same time. But it’s refreshing boredom. The discipline then becomes part of one’s daily expression of life. Such boredom seems to be absolutely necessary.”
There are some meditators who have turned the practice into what Trungpa calls, a militant appreciation of rigidity, or an aesthetic appreciation of simplicity. Each of these practice extremes is embraced, rather than actually being bored.
OK, I have never claimed to be a great meditator. I’ve always wanted to be one of those folks who could sit down on the cushion, have that beatific smile emerge on my lips, as I simply sat with the boredom. It never felt cool to me.
I always sat in the back of a meditation hall not because I was tall, but because I was a fidgeter. I moved, twitched, and scratched my face, and did all kinds of things to distract myself from the real reason I had plunked myself on the cushion in the first place. Ah, distraction. Ego incarnate. On one level it’s what the practice is all about, to learn to not seek comfort in the distraction, which is ego’s game. To be present, here and now. I have lived a life predicated on my keen ability to distract myself from my boredom, which my last essay subtitled, Ego, Ergo I go, was purportedly about.
I can remember being called on in class as a college student simply because I had drifted off in a vain attempt to distract myself from the utter boredom of the lecture on the minutia of minutia. “Mr. Schultz, are you with us?” Obviously, not, or you would have called on some other dolt who had found solace in some place other, as well. Ah, ego. If I had been less of an egomaniac, I might have actually learned something.
Within the meditation practice, boredom is actually extension of discipline.
Oh, how I rebelled against the thought of discipline. Then I discovered, discipline had nothing to do with the whip, yoke, and chain, but came from the same root as the word disciple, which was really about learning. I had always associated being disciplined with being imprisoned, not learning. Knowing that didn’t make it any easier. It was always held up as one of the many distinctions between myself and my sister. Christie was the smart one. I was the funny, cute, charming one. Christie was the valedictorian of her class. Needless to say, I was not. Christie was the ant, and I was the grasshopper. How many times had that story been held up as the model? And how many times have I completely ignored it?
I realize by admitting this, I give up some of my seeming credibility, but then Trungpa wrote that “boredom was anti-credential. Credentials are entertaining, always bringing you something new, something lively, something fantastic, all kinds of solutions.” I have done my best to acquire that kind of credibility so I didn’t have to sit with the real now, the simple, the boring.
Does my unwillingness to sit with the mundane make me a phony, a pretend Buddhist. Very possibly so. My root guru, Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, in his book, So You Think You’re a Buddhist? makes that abundantly clear. My whole-hearted belief in my ersatz practice, ultimately fooled only me.
So now I am relearning, redisciplining, re-immersing in the boredom. And as much as I resist, the “Coolness of boredom” Trungpa identifies, really does wash over me. And not just when I am skiing across the pool. It happens whether I like it or not. The exercise, the treadmills, the water exercise, the sitting on the cushion, the strength that arises from that exertion, actually feels kinda right. OK, not kinda, it feels right.
It’s not about the distraction, the entertainment.
It’s about being able to embrace the mundane, the ordinary stuff.
It’s about being able to embrace the mundane, the ordinary stuff. And in doing so, it makes living abundantly filled by the real that exists. Do I have to like it? I guess not, but perhaps seeing it differently, actually participating in what has always felt like the mundane to me; without complaint, without excuse, and perhaps with the same joie de vivre I find in the distractions I love, would cause less suffering. Not just for me, but for my wife, my daughters, and all those others who had to put up with my ego-filled behavior.
Ultimately, it would allow me to drop the Disneyfication of the world for which I have strived for all these years, and in many cases mastered, and actualize the practice. Which means, meeting the world exactly as it shows up, without expectation or bias. In all its fullness and all its routine, tedious activities. And in doing so, in really doing so, I will invariably discover, it is actually pretty cool.