An Essay A Day For A Year
By Roe
Day 55, February 24, 2012
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Boredom is something that I have a hard time dealing with. When I feel bored, I inevitably find myself searching for something to end my boredom. Busy, busy, busy. That is the name for our modern world. Bored, bored, bored doesn’t pay the bills or make my time go by any easier for me, so I don’t like it. Nevertheless, boredom is the most productive state we humans have. We are soul, heart, mind, body machines, and most of the time our mind is in control, and our body obeys, or at least it’s supposed to. I have found that when I have the least amount of boredom, and the most amount of mind-body business, I am the least productive. That seems kind of weird. It seems to me that boredom reveals self, and self is productive.
I guess I need to define productive boredom. My mind is like a computer, and it is busy, busy, busy all day, and then my very tired body just does what it’s told. But funny enough, my mind isn’t me. My mind ruminates about me and not wanting to be bored all day, and it does lots of fancy things, but my mind is only the robot of me. It gets strange when my mind thinks it’s me, and since it thinks about me a lot, it thinks it’s me a lot. That’s a weird möbius strip. I dare me to try and get off that one. To get off the möbius strip of thinking I’m me by thinking about me, I need to stop thinking, and doing, and avoiding boredom. What am I going to do all bored without thinking about me? That is a very good question.
My soul is the basket of me, and my heart is the fruit. I’m a fruit basket. My basket is always there, and so I don’t need to do much about having or not having soul, that is until I die. But what I was born with as fruit in my basket, now that is formidable indeed. Me, I’ve got plenty of heart. I’ve got lots of fat mangoes and avocados, and berries of all kinds. My mind is the verbal action of doing something with my fruit, and I do a lot of different processing day in and day out. I am in fact a living, breathing fruit processor, and as long as my engines are whirling and some kind of juicy mess is coming out, then I am happy. Except that most of the time I’m not happy. That is a fruity conundrum. My body of course obeys whatever order comes down from above.
I figured out that when my fruit engine mind is whirling, and my body is obeying, busy, busy, busy, I can’t even hear or feel my heart. How am I going to make that perfect, exquisite juice of me if I can’t even tell what fruit I have in the basket? When we are born we come with our own whole variety of the fruits of who we are. That is our Nature. Then, as we grow up we are influenced by our world around us, and that is our Nurture. I only wish that my world would have been more on the side of big, fat, juicy mangoes and avocados and berries. Unfortunately it wasn’t, and I ended up with all kinds of stange other things in my heart-fruit, like cooking bananas and weird, prickly things from far off places. Of course my mind and body has been spending decades like a nuclear, prickly-fruit reactor, forcing my body to do a lot of things that it turns out aren’t even me.
I graduated myself from high school at age 16, and then went off into the world to work on making cars and motorcycles for myself. Prickly fruit. Then I became a consummate wheeler- dealer buying and selling anything including refrigerators to Eskimos, and illegal army trucks to Vietnam. Weird. I then traveled all over the world looking for who knows what with all the fruit of my labors money that I thought I needed, and presto, abra cadabra, and eureka!, I found myself bored to tears, literally every day. I was so lonely all by myself in those foreign places, and I was so scared. And you wouldn’t think that I would be bored with so much to keep me busy all over the world, but how many volcano’s can you climb? How many countries can you cross on horseback? How many girls can you dance poorly with at the discos? I kept thinking that there must me something more. And then presto!, abra cadabra!, and Eureka!, as soon as I was so bored that it literally brought me to tears, I began to hear my heart! That’s it!
When I was bored to tears, literally, I felt myself turning inwards. Rather than plan my next adventure or country or meal, I was fantasizing and imagining and hoping and dreaming and wonting. Softly I heard a whisper directly from my very own internal fruit basket, and it said girl, girl, girl, girl, and then girl. I thought “girl?”, the last thing I needed was another disco girl or toy thing to distract me and threaten my adventurous trip. But in time I realized that my heart was yearning for “the” girl, and forever girl, and “girl” was to take priority and precedence over my very world trip itself. The idea scared me more than the boredom, and so off I went in search of anything that might distract me from anything truly me, down there in the mysterious land of my fruity heart. Then of course I found myself bored out of my gourd again, as they say, and my thinking gourd was beginning to piss me off. Who is this heart anyway, and why won’t it stop talking to me in my fantasies and dreams and imagination? Before long I had made myself a vow of celibacy, and obeying the true nature of my heart, went off in search for and hoping to find the ultimate and final “her”. This is the most momentous heart act in the history of modern civilization. Being a young, relatively rich, blond haired, blue eyed, handsome, free adventurer on a motorcycle attracted any and every girl from everywhere, and I became overwhelmed. When I was overwhelmed my ruminating mind took over and started racing, and I became even more confused. Argh!
So I remembered how I had first found my very own self there in my basket, and when I felt lost, I would go away and purposely produce my own boredom. I guess you could call my self induced boredom a self retreat, or self isolation, but in fact it felt kind of like a self burning or self flagellation. When my me started surfacing through all my mental ruminations, all kinds of pain and scary feelings came up. Since I was alone and had nothing to do, I just became a raving lunatic of loud fruit trying to get me to listen, and that is how I could figure out which girl was not right for me. 3,921 times she was not the right girl for me, until I found my “Girl”. I ended up building a seat for her on the sidecar of my motorcycle, then it was she and I setting off to become bored. It was the frying pan of me that I jumped into and endured, all alone, to find my true future.
I recommend now to myself now that I shut off by brain as much as possible, and I don’t agree at all with meditational techniques or any kinds of retreats for this and that. I know that I don’t do it enough, but I recommend that I place myself in situations of isolation and deprivation, and for me that just means stick with the boredom and feeling uncomfortable being with my self. As soon as I do that, I turn inwards and my hopes and dreams and mangoes and avocados all start to come back! It is really painful and really scary, but incredibly productive. Selling junk and traveling the world was productive, but compared to being happily in love and being with my four children, my previous life produced very little. My boredom has been so productive.
Now after having become a wheeler dealer again for 20 years to get myself and wife through college and help our kids to reach adulthood, I find myself listening to myself a lot more now, and that is because I am so bored, bored, bored! Help! Now I think I was meant to be a writer (mango), and musician, (avocado), and lots of other berry neat things. I was never a wheeler dealer at all, that was my nurture, but I was too busy thinking and acting on my nurture to listen to my nature. Bored, bored, bored. Me, me, me. I can’t wait for tomorrow to repeat.
How about you? Try going off into the woods for a week alone and stare at an ancient tree all day every day until it bears your fruit. Maybe I’ll find you there.
yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com
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