One evening after work, I decided to lie down on the daybed. Next to me was a humidifer spraying fine mist into the air that fell over my face like cool smoke. Through it my gaze found the angled ceiling, the skylight, the postcards I hung like banderitas across the protruding end wall. I looked out the large window and at the softly rolling landscape right outside the house. It was quiet, save for the rustling water in the humidifer, or the occasional snore from Loki sleeping by my hip. The loudness of my living body, my pulse and breathing and digestive bubbling, was obvious in ways I was seeing anew. It was calming, perhaps the calmest I had felt in a long time, but soon I began to feel bored.
I soaked in that boredom for a little while. Thoughts began to gather in the unease of my mind like birds at scattered seeds. I watched these sparrow-thoughts flit to and fro. In the room of my mind a window opened slightly, and when I turned my attention towards the sliver of golden light, overeager and restless, it disappeared. What fragile, luminous state I had accidentally created in that boredom had been broken.
*
In lieu of more, I lean into less—for now. I keep most evenings empty, and let myself just sit. Allow myself to be moved by the unplanned moment. Give Loki tender kisses when he jumps onto the page I was just writing on. Gaze aimlessly at the softly swaying trees with the radio playing in the background. Read a few pages until my attention wavers. Pause the radio. Resume staring.
*
I think we need to be bored again.
In my mind, boredom is the sticky orange of a summer afternoon when I had tired from whatever preoccupied me in the morning. It was the purgatorial state of wanting to do something but being unable to bring myself to do anything. Growing up, especially in late summer, I stared often at the barred and curtained windows of my West-facing childhood room, which was sweltering in the afternoon. The walls would be a bright, hot orange in that light, and I often imagined myself melting into the floor, as nothing.
Until a few evenings ago, I haven’t felt that way in a while. In my aversion to being bored, I have done one of two things: open my phone to entertain myself on social media, or find something productive to do, like another freelance project or a corner of the house to clean, because why should I waste time where there is so much to be done? Together, the endless stream of stimuli and anxieties about the future made an impenetrable wall against boredom.
*
Boredom, however, is a perfect beginning.
After imagining myself melting into the floorboards of my childhood bedroom, I would slip suddenly but smoothly into a daydream. As though by a riptide. I would then imagine myself in the fantastical worlds of books I had just read. I would be the winged protagonist, or the outcast with special powers, the daughter of a goddess, or a rabbit. Or, I would imagine myself walking through my dream house by a river, or a lake. It was small, but it had a study. Wind would always sway the sheer white curtains on the open, screened windows. Or I’d write a few lines of a poem in my head, and forget them by dinner.
There are a thousand ways to be creative, and being bored, I am learning, is one of them. It sets the space for the mind to wander without the barricades of physicality or a prompt or deadline. Wandering can take the form of daydreams, people-watching, meditation. It can be observing the manner in which my cat cleans himself, which begins at his shoulder and ends at his stretched paws.
That evening when I let myself, for the first time in a long time, daydream, I had found my way into everyday mysteries. Like that window that disappeared. A kind of generative capacity breathes only this way, in the openness of a still mind that boredom can lead to. My thoughts feel the most my own, and yet not mine, the way flowers don’t belong to a tree. In keeping boredom at bay with the rush after rush of stimuli on social media, or the grand plans in my diary, I had stifled the sound of my own, present voice. I entered beginnings unmoored, in a frenzy. It is strange and sweet to have heard it again with clarity, in a beyond so close, even if only in brief episodes. All I had to do was nothing.
This essay is part of my Exercises in Friction series, where I ponder on the consequences of convenience and why good things don’t, and shouldn’t come easy. Read the first issue below, and subscribe to receive the next one! Thank you for being here.
Surprise me
To regain a sense of agency over the culture I allow into my orbit, I have decided to reintroduce friction into select parts of my life. Friction, as I talk about it here, is the experience that makes me stop in my tracks. It happens when I brush up against something, usually something new and possibly uncomfortable, and when I do, I am invited into a moment to think. What is this? Do I like this? Do I want to keep going? Why is my immediate reaction to it a certain way?