Boredom

Can't we just call it a day, and give our overanxious and ironic selves a rest? Might we consider boredom as not only necessary for our life but also as one of its greatest blessings? A gift, pure and simple, a precious chance to be alone with our thoughts and alone with God? .... Speaking prophetically to future generations, including our own, (Bertrand Russell) writes that "a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men... unduly divorced from the slow process of nature, in whom every vital impulse withers."  Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, Riverhead Books, 2008. 40,41.

After weeks of rushing and anxiety―on October 21 my nephew Dennis' foot was severed in an accident. It's been reattached, but it's healing is iffy, still. And my sister and her husband are downsizing and moving across the country, and we've been trying to act in support―after all that,  today I could be tending a thousand small postponed jobs for my own household, and there is such an amount of unstructured time and such a lack of an organized list and agenda that I am at loose ends, hardly knowing what to do.

Soup's on the stove for supper, though, and one load of wash is dry and the next ready for the dryer. Small, specific and at the ground floor of life. And here I am, writing about the process of it. When I heard, "You can't fall off the ground," I recognized a profound truth. So when I experience acedia, ennui, or boredom, I know some ground floor places to turn to. A practice. Life as a continuing practice. And sometimes sprinkled, lucky me, with just a brief moment of the gift of boredom.