Gift of Boredom

At 28 years of age, earlier this year, when I decided to quit my only job, instead of being smart and make a  shift to a different news channel, I realised one thing. It was not unemployed status, but for the first time in my life, I was practically not working, essentially not doing anything and mostly sitting idle. Today, I realised that all that added to the most subconscious yet precious gift I have given myself – Boredom.

As is customary to my daily writings, I read a lot of quotes on this topic to give a structure to my thoughts. However, shocking as it just might not be, the internet is filled with negative quotes on boredom. It’s like being idle and being bored is the worst situation one can ever be in. Google it.

But then again, I remember this strong column in a not so old HT Sunday Brunch, by well known journalist and writer Seema Goswami, that I had come across, felt real strong with the Title, but still, never read it. Glad I never read it before, until today, when I was, by-every-means Bored (and a bit scared) to death sitting at home. This was “Why being bored is actually important for your child”.

Unlike the writer who has crossed the boredom time in her childhood and writing about the benefits of boredom today as a well settled, married with children, journalist, I write about my own experience at an age when few months ago I had literally exhausted myself of all the energy live life. I felt it was my end and even with regular food and strong work output, I felt like collapsing – a la Julien in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. I have the novel next to me on my table as I pen this piece and will do revisit it the next thing in my idle time, but for now, the child in me, who can’t remember experience boredom, even as he clearly remember the alone time he spent a lot in his childhood, is finally getting idle by clearing everything pending.

The pending things in my life today consist of sorting out my laptop data, mostly pictures, from past two years especially, starting from my April sojourn to Jaipur. It was that time I realised I have not lived my life as who I was that in a quest to find myself I did a lot of things, but without break, only to be exhausted from living my childhood in my adulthood. The sorting of data will be followed by clearning and stacking my entire life qualifications and certificates, especially my Masters degree from Hisar, so that I can finally take stand on my decision to move out of this country. Life is one thing at a time, even though I am really scared of my tortoise pace.

Amidst all this chaos handling, I need to get over my vulnerabilities of having teenage periods in my manhood and also sleeping on time for a early morning fresh body. The former is being worked upon, the latter is still haunting me a lot with every day failure. I just want to cry out loud.

Moving on.. I have an endless collection of movies to watch and books to read, but that will be with life. I need my good vocabulary in much less priority when compared to my need for finding what I really can think out of this boredom.

They say An Idle Mind is a Devil’s Workshop, and I couldn’t agree more with it. I have realised I kept working, something or the other, just to never let the Devil enjoy his workshop in me. Because whenever he did get in my mind, it’s been a travesty of living death proportions. But today, I just don’t want to be afraid of the existence of Devil. Instead, I want to make my mind so powerful that this Devil, of every kind and sin, can just never ever break into it.

This is why I am not shying away from all my old flames, and gay society and its parties, and especially my family. I want to face them, no matter how much weak. Just by closing my eyes, or shutting them from my world, or going out of India as soon as possible, may give me temporary relief, but their existence will continue. My previous runs have never been any good, and the past haunts more whenever I ran.

I don’t know what I will really grow old into, but one thing I am learning from this self presented Gift of Boredom is that I will not just be not-weak, but I will be strong in every way – mentally, physically, psychologically and subconsciously. This is because this Boredom is making me feel all the pain, only to be left with nothing but happiness filled immunity.

Ending this piece, I would finally like to share the one and only quote from Google, which makes me most optimistic about my idlehood and boredom.

Boredom always precedes a period of great creativity.