Boredom- How In The World Does It Exist

Back when… (Oh, this is going to make me feel old) two of our grandkids were not yet teenagers. They were swimming at our house. The boy who will soon to be going into the Air Force wanted to play video games inside, but I denied him that pleasure. He exclaimed, “But I’ll be bored!”

People who know me have learned by experience to never tell me they are BORED.

I cannot bring myself to believe that there is any reason for any human to be bored except one – they want to. I’m okay with that. But don’t complain about a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s like the activist atheist that complains about people believing in something that, to them, doesn’t exist. Why is it a problem?

If you are at any time bored with this life and can’t find anything to do, pick up a book, libraries are still free. Books can take you to fantastic foreign lands or teach you a craft and hobby. Even if you are all thumbs, you can get the vicarious thrill of doing-it-yourself just by reading a book about doing it. Stephen King, the master of good storytelling said: Books are a uniquely portable magic.

WARNING-Dogmatic opinions ahead.

A video game or a TV show will not take away your boredom; they will only increase your futility and boredom with life by filling up the empty white space for the time being. Like the empty calories of cotton candy, they taste really good but never satisfy or fill you up.

If you don’t want to read, write. Get out a pen or your laptop. Grip the pen lightly in hand over a tablet of paper and see what comes out. Along with reading, it’s also a strange magic. Poise your fingers over a keyboard while staring at the blank white rectangle in your word-processing software and voilà magic again. It’s no matter that others like it or not. Public approval is only a bonus to the joy I receive as I pen down my thoughts.

“What was that you said? ‘I can’t write!’”

I beg to differ, but you write every day if only in your head.

Start with the wishes you wished would come true –

A new job, adventure, lover or friend.

Create them on paper, explore their new worlds.

Bring them to life with ink, paper and pen

Or hide them away in miniscule bytes

Unseen data forever so full of life.

You write lists, emails and Facebook posts. You are quite clever aren’t you? Oh, let’s not forget the omnipresent text message, which only scraggly haired hermits with mystically yellow and curled fingernails forgo.

The answer I told my grandson to his statement/complaint about boredom:

“What’s wrong with that?” That ten-year-old face screwed up in a ball, started to speak, and then realized he’d been handed a hot potato of sorts.

From there on out he had a blast in the pool tormenting his younger sister and vice-versa.

Boredom perhaps is something to do in itself. Rich people are bored, poor people are bored, yet each have a mind and are endowed with the ability to create. Albert Einstein pointed out that every new idea or ingenious creation started with only one person who was born with the similar attributes as you and I.

Hopefully, I took away any excuse you had to be bored. I think I will go post a link to this blog on my grandson’s Facebook Page.

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