A fellow traveller in the bar at Dublin Airport ordered a large brandy. A minute later, he ordered a second one.
“Can’t stick the boredom,” he told me.
He was about to take a flight to New York, as was I. Having a few brandies before he got on the plane to help him sleep was his method for combatting boredom. If that didn’t work, he said, he popped a sleeping pill.
He didn’t mind feeling groggy and hungover when he got to New York. He would have escaped the boredom of the flight and he would be jetlagged anyway, so it didn’t matter.
I wasn’t looking forward to the tedium of the flight either, but I prefer reading and even working to the three brandies and a sleeping pill solution.
What I find intriguing about boredom is the urgency with which we run away from it, and the opportunities this offers to people who want to sell us things.
The smartphone has taken the flight from boredom to new levels. I saw a couple walk along by the Liffey near Chapelizod the other day, each absorbed separately in their smartphone. Facebook, I surmise, was less boring than the conversation they could have been having.
If I was an artist, perhaps I could depict the cycle of love beginning with two people staring with infatuation into each other’s eyes and then, a few years later, the two of them sitting side by side scrolling through their phones in silence. I guess it’s preferable to sitting side by side staring into the distance because they have nothing left to say, as used to happen before the smartphone era.
Meditation Lots of people take up meditation these days, but many drop it quickly because it’s boring. But meditation is what Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron calls “steadfastness”, which includes the ability to be with the self and to tolerate it.
In many respects, that’s what the whole boredom thing is about: an inability to be okay with being with yourself. Odd, isn’t it, that we find ourselves so boring that we desperately rush to get away?
Most of us have heard these lines by WH Davies: “What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and
stare.”
That all feels so very true. The reality is, though, that many of us, if given time to stand and stare, would dive straight into Facebook.
One afternoon recently I was feeling bored and nothing seemed to fill the gap. I was standing at a Luas stop on a cold and bleak day. There was boredom everywhere. I checked my email again and it contained nothing new – again. So I decided to tune into my boredom by focussing on the physical feeling of boredom and staying with it for as long as I could.
My boredom felt like a grey cloud in my stomach, but as I watched it I noticed that it felt rather more like a swirl of energy that was going nowhere.
It struck me that there is a certain liberation in being able to observe boredom instead of having to run away from it. If I can just allow it to pass in its own time I don’t have to turn to Apple or Microsoft or Diageo or my local drug dealer to help me escape from myself.
Commerce makes an awful lot of money out of boredom. It will happily give us games to play and things to look at in return for our cash, our time and our attention. Indeed, it is quite possible that commerce values our attention and our time more than we do.
And we can so easily end up living our lives not according to our inner values, but according to our apps.
The man in the bar slept his way to the US, snoring quietly from time to time. When we landed he looked at his watch and smiled. And why not? He had escaped having to spend eight hours with himself.
pomorain@yahoo.com
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness on the Go. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email.