Boredom

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

I love this quote. It tempts me to ignore how I feel so I can shake off my boredom like a wet jumper. But I can't tonight. It's too heavy. Boredom has weighed me down like lead so I am pinned to the moment. "Boredom," said Jean Baudrillard, "is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face."

How strange then that this is the very same sort of feeling I have when I am content. Why are there so many things that look very much or almost exactly like each other, and they are in actual fact almost polar opposites?

Lying beyond the heaviness of boredom is a fear of the silences. I have had a very edifying conversation today but it sort of kicked up the dirt of my emotions and now I'm feeling all upset about things I can't control. And now my emotions have sort of compacted themselves into boredom and an unwillingness to face the silences.

The silences. How quickly the beloved becomes an alien space to be. All it takes is several days of not actively entering into the silence - perhaps the most courageous thing I do every day, being still and knowing that God is God - and suddenly I am avoiding it, trying to fill it. I sit with it for half a minute and the tears are running down my face.

I don't know why I am crying. I do know why I am crying but I don't wish to talk about it here. I think I am afraid of what the silence has to tell me.

Expectations are the killer, aren't they? And yet we think that without expectations we have nothing, but we do not have nothing, we have expectancy. We think that entering into the void is entering into nothing and it's entering into the Everything. I am tired of sitting on this side of that.

I know on the other side of Silence is peace. How strange this life is. Everything I need I have, in some strange way which makes striving needless and my heart at peace. When I believe it. This is contemplation 101, is it not? That beyond the strife everything is radically alright. I feel it in my bones, it's just that tonight my bones are lead.

It all just feels too sad this evening. My expectations have confounded me and the expectancy sits on the other side of the Silence that I don't wish to speak to this evening. This is an unwinnable war and the sooner I wave the white flag the sooner peace is restored but I would rather sit out here tonight, sitting in the coldness of what I don't have.

We are rather stupid creatures when it comes down to it.