It’s quiet on the train. Everyone is sitting in his or her assigned seat, the landscapes flit by and I listen to Taylor Swift on repeat. There are moments in life we can’t really seize, they are layovers to another time, pit stops to getting somewhere. Or at least that’s what they feels like. Some call these moments boredom. I like to think of them as stilldom, instead. If you’re curious about your true nature just put yourself in the position where you’re waiting for something to happen. Boredom is that unique frame of time where life is on slow motion and you feel your thoughts and gestures getting repetitive. Your head gets heavy. You try to snooze off. You take deeper breaths. Your brain short-circuits on ideas. Life as you know it washes over you, ensnaring you in minute after minute of coulda shoulda wouldas or can-do and will-dos.

What do you do when you’re bored?

Recently I have been very bored. I have wound up on two museum trips, listening to the audio guide prattle on and on about useless dead facts and artifacts. I have walked from room to room taking in prized possessions of things I could care less about. I thought that I would rather die than view the next rare piece. Being bored got me wondering a lot if boredom isn’t the rarerest form of meditation. There is a stillness in boredom that I don’t think is easily accessible in many other states. In boredom, we get to a layer of ourselves that we often oversee: we hear our thoughts. And if we are attentive we can even transfigure them.

I don’t know if you’ve been bored recently. I hope you haven’t, but If you live a semi-comfortable life (or even if you don’t) I assume you’ve been through bouts of boredom before. I assume you’ve chewed on your fingernails, or gnawed your bottom lip in irritation at yet again not being able to move. Has it made you wondered what boredom is for?

I always say boredom is my best friend, in the sense that I love the quiet that comes with not doing. Or doing the same repetitively. There are many inspirational ideas that have come to me out of being bored. And yet boredom has such a bad rep. We will do anything to avoid being bored, including scrolling through Instagram for countless hours or watching episode after episode of a tv show. Why is it that we can’t take being with ourselves? Is it a lack of love? A love of doing? Or something else?

Our society is one that values doing over everything, so we often feel that there’s no space for the doing nothing that comes with boredom, or the doing something unenthusiastically. We are meant to charge forward and do it with a smile on our faces. We are meant to not look to deeply into ourselves and just mold into the shape of others. Recently, I read a book that references the Italian saying “dolce far niente”: sweet idleness. Beyond sounding beautiful, it made me wonder if maybe instead of being universal, boredom is actually a cultural thing that is perceived differently depending on where you’re from. Do some societies prize boredom above others? Is boredom looked at positively in some parts of the world?

Think of the last time you were bored. Maybe you were standing in line at a grocery store or maybe you were waiting for your boyfriend to call you back, think of how you were feeling and what kind of thoughts you were having, does it feel meditative? Does it feel like the beginning of something? I would like to argue that boredom is necessary for all of those who want to get somewhere with their lives. I would make the case that boredom is actually fuel for the fire. That it is the beginning of creativity. Boredom is the closest we can get to stillness without being intentional about it. So, maybe next time you get bored, give it a chance. Reach for that layer that exists beneath the I-want-to-gouge-my-eyes-out and see what is there for you. Try and look at your boredom as the beginning of something, instead of its end.

Not boredly yours,

Girl With One Earring