No.202

This week has found me thinking here and there about boredom, namely how terrible we are at both welcoming it and swimming in it (I almost wrote utilising it and then thought aha! this is the whole problem, boredom is hardly supposed to be utilised).

If I think back to childhood summers the thing that seemed the most thrilling and delicious was the anticipation of a giant expanse of boredom, the knowledge that all those weeks and all that time was unfilled, unscheduled, unknown. This was of course a time entirely without mobile phones, and although the family had a television it was rarely ever turned on—there were far more interesting things to be watched or experienced, and while it wasn’t seamless or serene I’m grateful to have had a growing-up that thrived on inventiveness.

When do we learn to shy away from boredom, to exorcise it so completely from ourselves? Largely it comes with traditional schooling, the subtle but searing punishments that come with not paying the right kind of attention, with looking dreamily out of windows during long, monotone periods of instruction. I want now, a lot, to allocate more time to staring dreamily out of windows. So many classrooms seem to lack windows at all now, and this seems horrifying and claustrophobic to me—I remember many days when elaborately imagining huge mythical creatures clawing their way up the school driveway to carry me off on winged backs was the only way to reasonably cope with the rigidity and expected conformity.

In a world we seem disappointingly determined to keep rotating using only capitalism and a patriarchy, boredom simply isn’t tolerated. It doesn’t earn anyone money. A child seems bored and someone puts a small screen in front of its unformed brain as a solution; an employee exhibits boredom at work and they are given some kind of warning about attitude; an afternoon plan falls through and most people rush manically to fill it back up; those in relationships are told to fear boredom with a similar level of intensity as one might sensibly fear a natural disaster; any tiny pocket of silence is also filled, near-instantly, with sounds! or speech! or solutions!

I read recently (and cannot for the life of me remember where) that a person was advised by someone, in the context of a spiritual this or that, to sit in a field and concentrate only on a patch of ground a square couple of feet in size for a whole hour. The point being that an entire universe happened in such a space, love and arrivals and growth and death and shadow.

Having read this I’ve been trying to figure out what an intersection or indulgence of boredom and acute attention might look like, and yesterday afternoon it looked like being slightly cold in the garden, lying on the ground and observing which things scaled or descended blades of grass (spiders, bugs I do not know the names of, water droplets), which things fell from the atmosphere (tiny feathers, determined seeds), and which things crossed on invisible lines through the sky (birds, noise, odd memories).

I wish we had built a world that thought boredom was beautiful. I wish we had encouraged societies where people felt they could be bored and safe and valued simultaneously. I want to raise concerns about the eradication of boredom in combination with the encouragement of minuscule attention spans, and suggest that very few things can truly change or mend unless we give ourselves time to stare absent-mindedly out of windows and dream up something else—likely that something is going to seem a little mythical at first, but I don’t really see another option for saving it all.

Note: If you are also interested or saddened, or both, by the absence of boredom and the distaste that surrounds it, I can suggest reading about two connectomes of the brain, the task positive network (TPN) and the default mode network (DMN), and their crucial role in attention spans and the widespread and intentional increase in distraction.

WORK-RELATED NEWS:

While waiting for each issue of Orion Magazine to arrive (the summer pages are on their way) I will at some stage begin work on writing the next season’s column, which this time around felt like one foot in the slow-to-start summer of Scotland and home while the other foot wandered itself towards autumn and the fact that the leaves will really only be staying for a few months. Below, a small excerpt from what is to come in the summer issue Root Catalog column, which is centred around Italo Calvino and book collections and family changes:

“Yesterday found me staggering through a tiny southwest town with banana boxes filled to their relatively shallow brims with books. Three of them, each heavier than the last, holding books that once belonged to my grandfather, who has not walked the earth for some two and a half years. His library has been waiting through three winters and two summers and two springs and three falls, absorbing the fact of his absence. All this time I have pictured him still sitting there, thinking in the study which overlooked the garden, the ancient oak tree several gardens down which had long since been stripped of every last one of its huge branches.”

(It may seem a strange thing to consider the trees shedding their coats when they’ve only just acquired them, but I think any practice of this sort is sensible, a gentle keeping-in-mind the ephemeral nature of almost everything at all, a way to hold the beautiful things just a little closer, just a little more gently, giving nature a type of attention that requires the recognition of impermanence. One thing I notice this with the most acutely is the swifts, whose dark scythe wings arrived in late May and who will leave the skies again before September’s end—I find myself already missing them, and this ensures I pay them my full attention and my foolish, human adorations.)

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Photographs by Linda Brownlee (whose work I first fell in love with around the time of No.130).

“All of it was supposed to be, although sometimes I was so tired.”

— Joan Barfoot, Gaining Ground