CATEGORY: Little Pieces of Life

I’ve been sitting on the sofa for half an hour now. Maybe longer. My head is tilted to one side as I stare out of the window without really looking at anything. My fingers tap nervously against the arm of the sofa. Tap. Tap. Tap. I stop. I sigh. Then I start again. Tap. Tap. Tap. I look at the ceiling. Then at the window. Then back at the ceiling, as if something fascinating might have appeared there in the meantime. Nothing. I purse my lips. Puff out my cheeks and slowly let the air escape. I jiggle my leg for a while. Stop. Start again. I glance around the room with the absurd hope that my own living room—the same one I’ve been sitting in all day—might suddenly decide to offer me some new form of excitement. Nothing.

“Oh, God…” I shift position. Cross my legs. Uncross them.

“I can’t take this anymore…”

I pick up my phone. Unlock it. Lock it again. Two minutes later, I pick it up once more, with absolutely no idea why. I put it back down beside me.

“Well, this is going well…”

I get up. Adjust the cushion behind my back. Sit down again. “Ugh…” I’m bored. Not just bored. I’m bored out of my mind. Deeply, endlessly, almost existentially bored. I’ve reached that point where you’re so bored you start getting annoyed even with the way you’re being bored. I get up again. Take two steps towards the kitchen. Stop halfway. “What are you going in there for?” No answer. I’m not hungry. I’m not thirsty. I don’t want coffee. I turn around and go back. Sit on the sofa again.

“Right… What do we do now?” Tap. Tap. Tap.

Outside, Athens is strangely quiet. Hardly any cars pass by. There are no voices. That familiar background noise you normally don’t even notice is gone—and suddenly its absence is impossible not to notice. It’s the first lockdown. And all at once, I’ve acquired something I used to wish for constantly. Time. Lots and lots of time. At first, I was thrilled. I’ll read, I thought. I’ll paint. I’ll finally do all those things I’ve been putting off for ages because “I don’t have time.” Well, now I do. I have time for everything. That’s the problem. I look out of the window again. Tap. Tap. Tap.

I’m desperately bored!

And that’s how I decide I need some new books and art supplies. Anything that might fill these endless hours that have suddenly moved into my life without bothering to ask permission. I start browsing through books, scrolling past titles almost mechanically. One. Another. A third. Until my eyes land on one book and stop. I stare at the title. Freeze for a second. Then raise one eyebrow. “Excuse me?” I lean a little closer to the screen and read it again. “I’m Bored.” I blink. Then I laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” For a moment, I have the bizarre feeling that someone has been reading my mind. “Okay,” I say to the screen. “Now this is getting ridiculous.”

A few minutes ago, I was sitting on the sofa tapping my fingers out of sheer boredom, and now there’s a book in front of me whose title is exactly what I’ve been repeating inside my head all day. I look at it again. “I’m Bored.”

“Me too, my friend. Me too.”

I have no idea yet what it wants to tell me. But right now, we have at least one thing in common. I’m bored too. I add it to my cart. Because, if nothing else, someone in there seems to understand exactly how I feel. “Go on then,” I think. “Tell me what you know. Maybe I’ll finally figure this thing out…”

The book arrives a few days later. I pick it up, turn it this way and that, look at the cover, check how thick it is. Thankfully, it’s a pocket-sized book. “Good,” I think. Considering how much I love reading, this shouldn’t take me long. I flick through a few pages. “Perfect.” I smile, almost satisfied. Soon enough, then, I’ll know what the author did when he got bored.

I open the table of contents. I quickly scan the chapter titles and suddenly stop. “A Boring Life.”My eyes widen a little. “Oh, good…” I smile. I look at the title again. A Boring Life.

“You’re my hero, and we haven’t even met.”

Finally, someone who seems to understand my problem. And he doesn’t just understand it. He’s devoted an entire chapter to it. I keep browsing through the contents with growing interest.

“Let’s see, then…”

I’m already beginning to like this man. I haven’t read a single page. I have no idea what he’s about to tell me. But so far, I feel as though we understand each other perfectly. I get up, walk to the kitchen and open an ice-cold non-alcoholic beer. Then I return to the sofa. Book in one hand, beer in the other. I settle in, cross my legs and take a sip. “Right. Now we’re talking.” I put the beer down beside me, open the book to the first page and smile. “Go on, then… I’m listening.” And I start to read.

Hours later, I turn the final page and close the book. The beer beside me has gone warm a long time ago and, apparently, somewhere along the way I completely forgot it existed. I sit still for a moment, the book in my hands, staring at its cover. Then I turn it sideways and look at its thickness again, almost suspiciously. “You did all that?” I think, smiling. Its size had certainly not prepared me for the depth of what was hidden inside. I had sat down on the sofa with my ice-cold beer, fully expecting to find out what Osho did when he was bored, and a few hours later I found myself wondering why I was bored. That had definitely not been part of the plan.

I look at my fingers and, without meaning to, remember the nervous tap, tap, tap against the arm of the sofa a few hours earlier. Back then, I had been certain the problem was simple: I was stuck indoors, my life had been turned upside down, and I was bored to death. But now something about that very convenient explanation had started to bother me. What if lockdown wasn’t the only thing to blame? What if, after all these years, my mind had simply learned to travel along the same familiar paths, constantly waiting for something to happen, something to change, something to keep it occupied? And now that everything around me had come to a halt, it had started protesting like a spoiled child whose favourite toy had been taken away. My body, on the other hand, seemed to be asking for exactly the opposite: to move, to wake up, to feel energy flowing through it again. I smile a little awkwardly and look at the book.

“Okay… I bought you because I was bored. When exactly did we decide to start talking about me?”

So, if I’m feeling this bored, maybe there’s something here I’m supposed to understand. What if the problem wasn’t that I had nothing to do, but that everything I had been doing until then had never really managed to reach my heart? What if those things filled my hours, kept my mind occupied, gave me the feeling that life was moving forward, but somehow remained there, on the surface? It wasn’t a particularly comfortable thought. Because it’s one thing to say, “I’m bored because I’m stuck at home,” and quite another to wonder whether you’re bored because, somewhere along the way, you learned how to fill your life without always being truly present in it. And then an even more uncomfortable question came to mind. One of those questions that, once they appear, you can’t easily pretend you didn’t hear.

What is it that gives meaning to my life?

Not what should give it meaning. Not the answer I’ve learned to give when someone asks me what matters to me. What actually makes mefeel alive? What touches me so deeply that I forget to look at the time? When was the last time I did something not because I had to, not to pass the time, not because I was trying to get somewhere afterwards, but simply because, in that exact moment, there was nowhere else I wanted to be?

I look again at the little book in my hands.

“Well, this is going brilliantly,” I mutter. “I just wanted to stop being bored, and now I’m searching for the meaning of my life.”

And while the pandemic doesn’t allow us to go anywhere, something inside me says that perhaps this is the perfect time for a different kind of journey. Inward. From the mind to the heart. From reason to love. I smile at the irony of the thought. Outside, the world has filled with restrictions, boundaries, distances, forms explaining where we’re allowed to go and for what reason, while I sit on my sofa beginning to suspect that perhaps the greatest journey of all doesn’t even require me to get up from where I am. Well, look at that… At a time of enormous limitations, I’m being invited to discover the limitless. And for the first time that day, the thought that I have nowhere to go doesn’t feel quite so suffocating. Perhaps, after all, I do.

I put the book down beside me and look out of the window again. The same view. The same empty street, the same strange silence, the same house, the same sofa. Except now something has changed. Or, to be more precise, nothing around me has changed. I’m the one looking at it differently.

“All right then,” I say to myself, almost defiantly. “If you’re so bored, then sit here and be bored.”

I don’t reach for my phone. I don’t get up and wander over to the fridge in search of something even though I’m not hungry. I don’t open another book, nor do I suddenly decide that this is finally the perfect moment to organise that drawer I’ve been avoiding for years.

I sit.

At first, I feel almost ridiculous.

“And now?”

Now, nothing.

That’s exactly the point.

And somewhere between the urge to get up and my decision to stay where I am, I begin to understand something I hadn’t noticed until then. It wasn’t so much the absence of things to do that made me uncomfortable. It was the absence of noise. Because in the silence, things slowly began to make themselves heard—things that had been very easy not to hear while I was constantly rushing around.

They may have taken away my freedom to go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted, but suddenly I had gained a kind of freedom I had never realised I was missing. The freedom to observe myself.

Not hurriedly, somewhere between two obligations. Not through the endless filter of “What do I have to do today?” and “Where do I need to be tomorrow?” I had time to look at myself without being in a hurry to leave myself behind in order to get to something else.

And I began to wonder how strange this thing we call freedom really is. Until then, I had mostly associated it with being able to go wherever I wanted, see whoever I wanted, choose what I would do with my day. Now, confined within four walls, I was beginning to discover another version of it: being able to stay alone with myself without immediately needing to keep myself busy, entertain myself or take myself somewhere.

And then a thought crossed my mind that made me smile. After all those years when I could go anywhere I wanted, how often had I actually gone inward, towards myself?

I’m going to tell you something that may sound a little crazy. From that day on, whenever I feel boredom approaching, I no longer rush to make it disappear. Quite the opposite—something inside me smiles. I’ve learned that boredom usually brings something with it. Something that has been buried, waiting patiently for the noise to stop so that I can finally hear it.

So whenever that familiar “I’m bored…” begins to creep in, I imagine myself as a bit of an archaeologist who has just discovered a spot worth excavating. In my mind, I roll up my sleeves, pick up my trowel and brush, and think, “Right then… Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

And I dig.

Not hurriedly. Little by little. One layer at a time. A thought. A desire I had pushed aside. A need I hadn’t noticed. A truth I perhaps wasn’t quite ready to admit. I never know beforehand what I’m going to find. Perhaps that’s the most beautiful part. All I know is that somewhere beneath the surface, there is something of mine waiting to be brought into the light. And so, where boredom once had me nervously tapping my fingers against the arm of the sofa, these days it almost puts me on alert.

“Oh, you’re back?”

I roll up my sleeves.

“Let’s see what we’re going to unearth this time.”