Time

Here we are in this place in time.

Time.

I was in class yesterday. It was the first day of my first year writing class, and we had a substitute. The course itself is called Adventures in Boredom in which we, the students, talk about boredom and the relevance of it. I was suffocated in silence from the moment I walked in. You know that moment when you arrive on time to class, and all of the other students look at you as if you have something hanging out of your nose. Those few moments in which you collapse into yourself, becoming entirely unsure of the actuality of your being. That out of body experience where you crawl out of your skin and make sure that you indeed do not have anything hanging, dripping, or leaking from any part of you. That is how it felt.

We sat there until it was promptly ten o’clock and then the ice broke into shards. The intros were pried out of each of us by the professor, the professor that was subbing for our seminar, and like children, we sat in a circle and spoke. We were told to share our names, origins, and lastly what made us bored and how we coped with that almost paralyzing feeling.

As the room changed climates, now accepting laughter and the occasional unzipping of a bag, I began to shed the shell that was holding me still since I took my seat.

Hi, I’m Katie from Texarkana, Texas and I am really impatient. Waiting is so unsettling to me yet wholly unavoidable, so that makes me bored I guess. To combat this agonizing feeling of boredom I make lists. I make to-do lists, lists of things I’ve accomplished, grocery lists. I carry around my calendar to make sure that I get everything done on my list to feel productive.

That was my introduction.

As each of us took our turns sharing and listening you could feel the warmth move through the room. The raw attentiveness and compassion that every single person there felt for their neighbor's definition of boredom.

Our impermanent professor then started to form his case. I didn’t think it was possible to talk about boredom and all of its variations and facets for an hour and a half, but we did, and frankly, we didn’t feel bored at all.

Yesterday the root of this problem was actually brought to my attention. We live in a culture that is scared to be bored. We are so mortified at the unknown timeline that our bare existence sets on. When we are finally alone long enough to just sit with our thoughts we remember the fact that we are going to die and want to use up our time well.

It is so easy to compare time to money or something that is limited to us because it is, but it is also necessary to make grand investments. Take this class, for example, it’s expensive as hell, but it is worth the money to get an education. Time is parallel to that example. Investing a chunk of your time into yourself and allowing boredom to exist in a place where you can coexist with it is a skill that is so valuable now. It is valuable because of this need, this hunger to be productive in our society. When we aren’t doing anything that produces a tangible result, we often find no pleasure or satisfaction in the task. We want real results as opposed to emotional fulfillment. The most creative thoughts come when you aren’t forcing yourself to do something just to cross it off of your list.

If this jumbled pile of thoughts resonates with you in any way at all, I hope you will take this into account. You are a dying animal. Time is inevitably going to fall out of your grasp, so it’s only beneficial to think of time as a New York minute and let it pass because it is a gift to be able to do absolutely nothing in this place in

time.