Treat boredom as if it were… Exciting!
And it will be the exordium of something dazzling
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I arrived here out of boredom.
“Danger!, Danger!,” my unconscious shouted.
“You are locked up, and the only thing to see or hear is a silent painting, drying up tenuous and prudent”.
At the same time, the body was telling me: “I want to get rid of the restless leg, the tremor of absurd fear, the overwhelmed feeling, the silence that bursts my ears, of . the .. ever … slower …. watch ….. ticking …… time ……. away …….. but ……… never ………. closer ……….. to ………… six”.
And therefore I write, to gently stab time.
We don’t know what our distant ancestors did when they were bored because according to Julie Sedivy in her article Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings? they didn’t write about it.
For example, the saga of King Harold of Iceland, written around the year 1230 begins with action.
“King Harold proclaimed a general tax and assembled a fleet, summoning his forces across the length and breadth of the Earth”.
In the third paragraph, the king launches his fleet against a rebel army, fights numerous battles that end in massacres, covers the wounds of his men, gives rewards to the loyalists and ends “supreme over all Norway”. What the saga doesn’t tell us is how Harold felt about all this or why he did it.
Was he bored?
Boredom is a preamble
Boredom brought me to this page. I write to bury a dagger in time. Perhaps, with the power of a medieval king, I’d have instead started a war. But the way humans respond to boredom has changed dramatically in recent years.
This is how Dr. John Eastwood, a clinical psychologist at the University of York in Toronto, tells it.
“We are very used to being passively entertained,” he says. “We have changed our understanding of the human condition to a basin that needs to be filled”. And like an addiction, “… we need another hit to remain at the same level of…
