Sat on the sofa, holding my thoughts up to the light for inspection like so much dirty laundry. Threadbare reasoning fleeing under the solar flare of attention into insubstantial wisps of cobweb justification. Turning the searchlight inward is a typical behaviour pattern for me. Frank acknowledgement of the results is not. To lay the results of my thinking out on the proverbial chopping block:
I’m bored, and I don’t know what to do about it. Mainly because I’m not entirely sure what I’m bored with.
When I say I’m bored, I don’t mean with my relationship, with the segments of my life that exist outside of the necessities of functioning as a modern human being in the 21st century. I have a wonderful girlfriend, who I appreciate with new eyes in this new decade. Every day she never fails to make me notice the beauty in the universe I’ve turned my face from for far too long. It’s an important point to make.
Boredom and frustration figure as separate colours in the emotional spectrum to me. Frustration is characteristically spiky and antagonistic, prone to possession annihilation and expletive strewn ranting at targets of opportunity. Boredom is more of a diffuse glow through the brain, a pearlescent curtain that seeps through everything, dulling the colours, blurring the edges. It leads to apathy and blankness, inertia and a huddling around the comforting dullness of familiarity. Old books, older thoughts, engrained thought patterns and processes that fail to truly examine the reason for the boredom. Quite often it pulls towards the internet, where abandonware and wikipedia offer a way to slip back into the hobbies of the past, when I was convinced that life would evenntually arrange itself in such a way that I would emerge from the throng successful.
Having acknowledged the existence of boredom, my focus shifted to the reasons behind it. Once the personal relationship angle has been examined and discarded, the remaining possibilities are still myriad and elusive. Pinpointing boredom. Roughly akin to nailing evening mist to a wall. I have to admit to a certain lack of motivation and interest in my professional life, but no appealing alternative offers sufficient financial compensation to make it possible.
So where else could the malady lie? Perhaps in a certain lack of achievement I feel within myself. But surely that would produce annoyance rather than boredom? It’s also not a new or unusual circumstance for my brain to find itself in, whereas the feeling of boredom has crept up in the last few months.
Not knowing the source of the boredom is making dealing with it extremely awkward. It obviously required further study.
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