Lughnasa College Moon
A beautiful day. Odd for me since I woke up early, got some work done early as a result and have time now, since I only workout on MWF, that I really don’t know what to do with. I’m bored. Which is in unusual for me. At least to admit it.
If folks say they’re bored and act as if the world owes them something interesting to do, I lay it down to lack of imagination. So, I loop this smug comment back onto myself.
Boredom, like melancholy, has come to have a place in my life though. And for similar reasons. They are both caesuras, gaps between this action and that one, between that project and this one. Too often I can use a writing project or that gardening chore, or working on this blog, or whatever else is available to fill uncomfortable lapses in time.
When I engage tasks for tasks sake, I learn nothing, I press away whatever might come to me if I go still, become quiet, as I do sometimes at night. Accepted in this way both boredom and melancholy have a purging effect, a cleansing of the anxiety driven task completion mode so common among us Americans. And doubly so among us Americans of northern European ancestry.
You might even see boredom and melancholy as cousins to meditation, a certain stilling of the mind, letting the gears grind more slowly or even go to full stop. I hesitate to assign them a utilitarian purpose because both have their dark elements. Boredom’s I really can’t be bothered accents and melancholy’s self-denigration are negative in themselves. But when either boredom or melancholy helps us step back from our life, examine it, see what might be missing or what’s too abundant, then they serve a real purpose in the psyche’s economy.