Embracing boredom

I am now staring into a black, blank screen; the yellow cursor is pulsing, waiting for my first word. A master stoic – it will not give me any hints, urge me on or slow me down; it will wait patiently, pulsing in perpetuity.

I have a sound clipping of rain and rolling thunder playing on speakers – a fake refuge from the incessant complaints of the squeaky ceiling fan and muffled traffic horns. As it stands, I don’t have any clue about what to write; these days, I seldom do. It always just starts with a Jackson Pollock of thoughts around a central theme. I won’t know what I want to say until I’m halfway done.

Waiting for inspiration and ideas to hit me before I began was one of the biggest mistakes I made. It took a lot of learning to realise that your creative zone is always elusive and intangible. It’s a fragment of a summer dream – intense yet ephemeral; the memory of which is volatile, vaporizing when you try to grab at it. It’s a young butterfly in Eden, whose vibrant gossamer wings tempt you to give chase, but remain comfortably out of reach.

This creative state is when the most beautiful of your ideas come together. The thoughts that were haphazard and poorly considered suddenly take form and depth. Math becomes a language, equations speak to you; intricate brush strokes flow naturally; seemingly disconnected paragraphs become coherent. Dark clouds of dissonance part away to let harmony shine through. You forget yourself – destiny makes you a vessel and plays itself out.

Productivity enthusiasts call this the flow state, Stephen Pressfield in ‘The war of art’ calls it the muse. This state only comes to you when you are entrenched in mundane repetition; when you are plodding uphill against a semi-blank canvas; when you are fatigued by the echoes of your mind.

This was a problem because I’ve had a pretty bad history with boredom – from the time I could, I’d always just run away from it. As a teenager in the 2010s, the internet was my biggest source of comfort. The world wide web provided a convenient escape hatch from being caught in the stream of time. It was painful being in said waters where deep-seated anxiety and repressed emotions quickly float up to the surface. So, why not press the skip button on the present, burn 6 hours, become so exhausted as to have a thought-less transition into deep slumber?

The internet cradled me like a baby: Having a rough day? Here’s a page full of endearing contagious laughter, 88 hours of a sitcom about close friends, a peek into the lives of your distant acquaintances – all at your fingertips, lying in wait as quick-fix dopamine patches. It provided me with so much comfort that even when walking under the warm winter sun, I chose to face the light from the screen.

This ceaseless consumption soon revealed itself to be dichotomous to any kind of creative output. I learned that the creative process is painfully slow, full of doubts, iterative, and tedious. It’s like being in a long hallway, in pitch-black darkness, searching for the right door that opens to the right key in the bunch. I saw that to be consistently creative takes fearless introspection – peeling layer after layer of your psyche and peering within. What I was used to and what I was supposed to do were complete opposites. I had a choice in front of me; two roads diverged in a yellow wood and even though Frost taught me which to pick, I didn’t know how to traverse it.

Anyone from my generation onwards could attest that there are no unsolvable problems in life, only incorrect search statements. Most difficulties you face already have a neat, documented plan of action available this instant, for free. This is the age of information where there is no societal incentive in solving problems that others already tackled. I was unwittingly trained long ago to quickly search for the correct answer rather than slowly rediscover it. In my fast-paced life, unoriginal problems did not deserve original solutions.

Now, as luck would have it, my desire to be creative meant taking an unoriginal problem and being original in response, every single day. A peek at this unknown filled me with dread – how to walk a path when you’ve forgotten how to move your limbs?

It is rare, but sometimes, life slaps you across the face, simultaneously showing you your privilege and teaching you a lesson. My metaphorical dilemma turned out to be my ex’s father’s literal, physical disability. He is a frail man in his late 50s, always seated and stationary, owed to his affliction with Parkinson’s. He has a pacemaker with leads coming visibly out of his chest, going all the way up and behind his ear, finally re-entering the skull. These leads connected directly to the brain help reduce the intensity of his tremors (Deep brain stimulation). I distinctly remember how his face was always frozen in time, and how his words were formless mumbles that only his family could discern. He was a man trapped in his own body that was slowly forgetting how to function.

Still, by all accounts, he is a hilarious and jolly individual, seemingly unphased by his condition. Even though he needed assistance with most activities, he fiercely guarded the ones he could manage by himself. Walking was one of them.

He couldn’t will his legs to move, so when he wanted to walk, he would lean forward until he was on the verge of tipping over. When he felt he’d lost all control and is falling this time for sure – one of his legs would drag out ahead, through sheer instinct, to keep the balance. He’d push off of that leg and drag the other one forward: a step. On some lucky days, the momentum activated his muscle memory but when it did not, ‘rinse and repeat’.

This was a man with no room for distractions like the destination. For him, the only reality was the step; the destination acted solely as a compass. He couldn’t afford to be concerned with the how, that was a privilege reserved for those with a choice. He leant into the abyss with indefatigable courage because he truly knew the pain of being stagnant.

I learned that the battles you wage against yourself are not quick, open-field, action-packed manoeuvres. They are uneventful, measured and interminable sieges instead. It’s a war of attrition to break through the crenellated walls erected by your self. The siege never ends, there’s always another wall, but the moment this one falls, as the enemy troops retreat, you catch a glimpse of who you are. I learned that in a world eager to entertain, I need to embrace boredom to grow.