PLACATE OR PURSUE?

April 9th, 2020

Most people don’t give boredom a chance.  There’s something a bit unnerving about boredom.  It’s something to be quelled and filled in order to push it away.  Watch this rerun, or play this mindless game, anything to keep the boredom out of the picture.

But endure boredom long enough and something new happens.  Curiosity slowly starts to unravel itself from a deep sleep.  But it takes time.

You can heat up water, in fact you can heat it above room temperature for a long long time, but until it hits 212 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s simply not going to boil.

Likewise, boredom will not rouse that latent superpower if we can’t sit with that boredom for long enough.  That is, in the more subtle, productive forms.

Curiosity and boredom are easily muted by the new tv show, with it’s cliff hangers and it’s perpetual guess about the next moment. 

Such distractions perhaps play into the structure of curiosity and boredom too well.  There’s never a chance for such things to motivate us towards something new, to pursue as opposed to being placated.

Feed a cat and it’ll grow fat, but let it alone and it’ll root out all the mice in the neighborhood.

Curiosity is much the same way.  If we keep it fed with a steady diet of mindless consumption, it loses all agility, all facility to propel us deeply into new subjects.

We either placate curiosity, or we let it grow hungry, until it chases us into new and interesting endeavors.