Boredom as Bioremediation

Collage art from oracle deck in progress by Brenda Peregrine found @ Portland Saturday Market

“The times are urgent. We must slow down.”

It has been five years since I first heard Bayo Akomolafe share this seemingly paradoxical plea, nearly six years since the global pandemic altered life as we knew it, one year since the infrastructure of the United States began falling away in sheaths like eroding cliffs into a mercurial ocean, tumbling much of our global sense of security with it. The times have certainly not become less urgent.

For the past several years I have taken silent, solo, three day retreats. I call this practice Quest. Quest involves retreating from the world, preferably to the wilderness, and spending time alone with yourself, your thoughts, your senses, for three full days. Some folks practice fasting, some take minimal shelter, most suggest minimal reading, none invite their phones along. I do some version of Quest about four times a year and I have begun to notice that each Quest offers a kind of theme. This winter I retreated to the wild desert landscape of Joshua Tree and Quest taught me about boredom. I learned about the flavors and variations of boredom. And then I learned about boredom as a portal.

I was an agitated kind of bored on my first full day. When the fuss of getting up and dressed was done, I took a good while to sit and stare at the desert. A cloying sense of irritation started to work its way in. I felt like I had gotten some desert sand under my skin and try as I might I couldn’t scratch it out. When it became overwhelming, I stood up and paced back and forth, digging my heels into the earth a little bit with each step. Sometimes I can help metabolize challenging emotions by finding a sympathetic way to move my physical body with them. The restless, agitated boredom was so visceral I paced it rather violently for a while. Eventually, I felt that energy shift and I sat and stared some more.

The next day, another spell of boredom arrived. This boredom was accompanied by a note of curiosity. I almost felt like my survival of the first days’ agitated boredom had earned me a new, more palatable flavor. This boredom I could just sit there and hang out with. At one point I remembered meditation. This cracked me up a bit, actually. In my workaday life, meditation often feels like an inconvenience and interruption of something very important. In this boredom it felt like a revelation - a welcome relief. At least it was a thing to do. It felt easy compared to the experience of my agitated and curious boredoms. However, once I was done meditating, boredom eeked back in, changed again.

This felt like a flatter, more accepting boredom. I spread my towel out in the desert sand and lay down on it. I closed my eyes for a while, just noticing the thoughts, the texture of boredom in my awareness. I noticed my breathing. It felt slow and easy. I could hear it a little bit - at certain points in both my inbreath and outbreath there was a small sound of motion, like wind as it turns a corner. I laughed to myself again as I pictured my breath whipping around the corner of my nostril like a cave entrance.

My eyelid, which had been having a twitching fit at least once a day before Quest, felt still and heavy - slow moving even. I could feel my pulse in my hands and my chest and, while it didn’t feel particularly slow, it didn’t feel fluttery or tense as it had some times before. I thought with interest at the anomaly of noticing an absence of a sensation. Boredom, also, is a kind of absence feeling - the absence of stimulation. It made me curious if the persistence and intensity of stimuli in my daily life requires my body to provide louder signals - like she must holler over the din to be perceived.

I opened my eyes and looked at the desert again. I focused closer in this time. I observed the way that the shadows of the creosote bush fell upon the patterns of the desert sand. The desert floor itself was a study in contrasting, uneven textures: the glittering pieces of sand, the tiny riverbeds where the flash flood waters cut through, finding the fastest place they could travel downhill and carving out their temporary shape.

I became aware how calm my body felt, my senses more awake. I realized I could hear the flap of little bird wings as they passed in small flocks overhead, or alighted on fence posts nearby. I sipped my water and for a moment thought I could taste it. It felt like velvet on my tongue, only a few degrees cooler than the air but the texture, a delicacy.

Later that evening I reflected on how much of my own experience I had been missing out on. My pulse had been there before. So had the birds, the bushes, the desert floor, the velvet water. It’s not like they materialized once I began my Quest. What else have I been missing? I wondered what would happen if I did this for more days. What if I Quested for five days next time. What exotic experience of being a human in a body on this planet might await me if I spent five days dodging in and out of these portals of boredom?

I began to contemplate the idea of boredom as a portal to bioremediation. That on the other side of boredom awaits a truer, closer to the earth, closer to my body kind of reality. That with more time and trials passing through the portal I might arrive at a more authentic life, detoxified from the oppressions of hustle culture, dopamine- or doom-scrolling. That I might evade the gravitational field that demands we become overwhelmed, mindless donors of labor, attention, and data, to the megacorporations that benefit from the overculture.

At the end of my Quest I couldn’t wait to bring home what I had learned about boredom. But when I arrived, set my suitcase in the front room and promptly exploded it, ushering the salsa jars I had smuggled back to Portland into the fridge, dispatching three quarters of the clothes to the laundry machine and filing the large stack of books I had taken with me back into the bookshelf, my eyelid gave a twitch and I realized that a deeper intervention is needed.

Getting properly bored, it turns out, is a lifestyle choice - seriously countercultural one because it means abandoning my phone for long periods of time and committing to doing less and less. It means turning a discerning eye to all the projects I have filled my life with and determining which are truly enriching and which have become filler or burdensome. It means setting boundaries with my own craving for stimulation.

I have been trending in this direction for a while now. My regular Quest practice already inspired me to keep my phone off until 11am most days, earmarking that time for meditation, morning pages, working with the previous night’s dreams, and writing. On Fridays I extend that time until 5pm which feels like a long enough window to get a little bored, at least intermittently. It feels radical to devote myself to an absence - a kind of nothing. But I hope that becoming an acolyte to boredom may grant me entrance to a wildly analog and extraordinarily real life.

As I get ready to share these ponderances with you readers, I wonder - when was the last time you felt bored? What is your relationship with boredom? How would you feel about setting out on a mission to spend some time trying to hunt down boredom?

POSTSCRIPT:

I hesitated for several weeks to publish this. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was off key, dismissive of all that is happening. With the incredible tragedies unfolding daily in our world I worried that a piece about boredom would smack of impossible privilege and disconnection. As I sat with this feeling I eventually came to the conclusion that it is not my job to succumb to the pressure to have a new, compassionate, authentic opinion on every current event - though I feel the pressure to do so (as I imagine everyone with even the tiniest platform feels also). It is my job to write about my small piece of the garden we are all tending and that is how to survive in the shell of the old world while feeding the new one. If I feel off key, I hope it is because I have found a fresher, more countercultural patch of the garden to share with you. As always, please take what feeds the beautiful revolution in you and leave the rest.