Boredom

When did Coronatime begin I wondered tonight, so I started typing into The Google, "How many days has it been since March..." and that's where I stopped. In the auto-filled results, it said that it has been 106 days since March 13. Apparently, I am not the only one trying to figure out how long it has been since everything changed. Here on Day 106, or Day 108 for me, every day of my life feels like looking at beige carpet. It's functional and reliable but not much else. It's simply there. I'm simply here. And I go on with the days, twenty-four hours at a time.

For the last three Saturdays, I've been attending a program offered through a spirituality center titled "Cultivating Hope." Each Zoom session has talked about this virtue as well as what might be considered the opposite, or the antithesis, of hope. Today, it was boredom, which was ironic because just before the session, I was standing in the kitchen, finishing up my lunch of leftover red lentil coconut curry, asking myself if I had finally come to a point of acceptance of this new reality or if I was just bored. Over the last one hundred days or so, I have wailed and lamented many times over the many things that I miss, over the many things that I feel have been robbed from me. There have been more ugly cries than I can count. Once in a while, I even take a round, citron pill to calm me down. At the kitchen counter today, I didn't feel the angst that has so often overtaken me, especially on weekends, but I also didn't feel anything else really, thus my analogy to beige carpet. In a previous session of Cultivating Hope, we were invited to think about what our purpose is in life. I saw more beige in my mind's eye when asked to ponder that. So yeah, I'm feeling pretty directionless right now. Even small tasks are not easy to accomplish.

In the session, the presenter described boredom as "the death of wishing... a sense of emptiness.... feeling of being trapped.... a sense that purpose has been lost... no sense of will." As I look inward, many of these elements are present in my life. I'm left wondering if the emptiness I feel is some kind of acceptance, some kind of boredom, some kind of resignation, or some kind of coping mechanism during a time of trauma. I suspect they are not mutually exclusive, either, and are probably overlapping and exchanging DNA. Could this sense of "boredom" also be connected to a misfiring of chemicals in my brain? If only there were answers, then there could be easy solutions.

The presenter gave a few antidotes to boredom: finding a rhythm, connecting with others, and doing something special, such as a writing a letter to someone or learning about nature. All of that sounds nice, but most of the time I sabotage my good intentions with a long scroll on Twitter, isolating from the world, and sleeping. Perhaps naming the phenomenon I'm experiencing isn't as important right now as recognizing that something has shifted within me over these 100+ days. No doubt, these are dark times, and I cannot believe that I am the only one wrestling with some kind of transformation.

Where is the hope in all of this? As I re-read and edit this post, I wonder the same thing. The presenter spoke of hope as the ability to wait. Can I get to the point of "positive and creative waiting," as he talked about? We all want the pandemic to be over, but what is it that I hope for on the so-called other side? I believe the other side has already crept in, and it's not going to leave me alone until I address it.

Today's session ended with a long quotation from Gerald May's The Dark Night of Soul. May was a theologian and psychiatrist.

And I am reminded of how attached I am to the idea of progress; I am looking for objective evidence that I am making headway in this spiritual journey. Yet the truth of the journey admits of no such evidence, and it completely transcends my petty notions of progress. So in the end I am left only with hope. I hope the nights really are transformative. I hope every dawn brings deeper love, for each of us individually and for the world as a whole. I hope that John of the Cross was right when he said the intellect is transformed into faith, and the will into love, and the memory into…hope.

I hope the nights—the dark nights—are transformative and can turn this beige carpet into something more lovely.