The Upside of Boredom?

I learned recently that the poet Joseph Brodsky gave a commencement speech some years ago at Dartmouth College entitled, In Praise of Boredom. That got me thinking about what, if anything, there actually is to praise about boredom. It also got me thinking about something I think people are hesitant to raise in the midst of a deadly pandemic, viz., the role of boredom — or perhaps more accurately, monotony — in our lives this past year, and into the current one.

Boredom conjures images of lethargy, of people sitting around staring off into space, not having any evident task or purpose. There is, of course, that kind of boredom, the one that seems to be characterized by aimlessness, by a kind of physical inability to rise to any occasion because, well, there’s no occasion to which to rise.

But I think there’s also a different kind of boredom, one that’s probably more active than those experiencing it might even realize. Pandemic boredom might better fit into this category. During the intense lockdown period of the earlier days of COVID, I recall being very focused on safety, on personal and familial health, and on being sure that I was following all the protocols of which we were made aware. This felt even more urgent as we wrestled with everyone in our nuclear family contracting the virus.

But then that period passed. And something else settled upon us. It became most clear to me in seeing how the shift from life lived out in the world to life lived inside our apartment affected my autistic son. He went from having a schedule of things to do and of places to go, to having an empty calendar. He had no reason to get up in the morning, no reason to get dressed, no reason to be on time for anything, anywhere. So he stayed in his pajamas a bit longer, and breakfast was had a bit later in the morning because, well, why not? I couldn’t figure out how to fill his now empty hours, and it helped assuage my guilt to have my son sleep later, so I felt fewer of those hours weighing upon me.

Utter nothingness transitioned to time spent on the computer, focused on age-inappropriate things like Sesame Street videos and math games suited to grade schoolers. I couldn’t get my son to leave the apartment for months, even to take a short walk, to help me take out the dogs. And it frankly didn’t seem worthwhile to push hard, though it was one more thing to add to the “mommy guilt” list.

I tried to get my son interested in online versions of his in-person classes, but he just couldn’t connect to distance learning. And I didn’t have it in me to try to manage his resistant behaviors, especially if I thought they might disrupt others’ enjoyment of whatever class was on that day. So my son reverted back to his slender routine, which consisted of entirely too much time on his computer, coupled with asking me everything from when the virus would be over, to what’s for dinner, to what we’d be doing during the summer. Over and over and over.

It was painful and instructive to watch my son experience what I think must have been the purest kind of boredom. He didn’t openly chafe against it, or ever say the words “I’m bored.” He seemed almost resigned to his fate, and that resignation struck me as something meaningful. Not because my son doesn’t care about having a fuller, more engaged life. I actually think he cares deeply about that very thing. But because he evinced a kind of radical patience, an ability to wait out this virus thing with a breathtaking equanimity. And that reminded me of something about myself that I continue to struggle to learn: how to accept the thing I’m experiencing, even as I might work toward or anticipate changing it.

I’m not by nature a patient person, and the boredom, the monotony, that this virus has imposed, has been a strange and challenging test. Can I figure out how to live my life productively — happily, even — at a time when productivity has taken on a very distorted meaning, when happiness has been reduced, in many moments, to nearly infintessimal kinds of triumph? Are these even the things that I should be focused on?

During this past pandemic year, full of so much misery, full of the angst of a collapsing nation, of economic challenges, and of worries about illness and loss in our intimate midst, do these personal quibbles about boredom even matter? In some ways, the radical limitations that pandemic living has imposed have opened up new spaces, new ways to understand what any given life amounts to. My conclusion: not much. I don’t mean that in any way to trivialize human life; each of us matters infinitely much. But maybe, our importance is the thing that matters less. The narrowing of our lives opens us up to the fissures through which we can perhaps see more clearly who we are, how we matter, and above all, to whom we matter.

I think that’s what observing my son’s boredom and experiencing my own has taught me. Boredom is a kind of strange weight. It doesn’t feel like much at all, and precisely because of that, it feels enormously heavy. There is so much pressure in this world to do and to be, to achieve and to announce, to discover and to know, to excel, and so on. It’s exhausting just to think about the pressures we allow ourselves to be crushed under. Yes, there are daily tasks we must get done. Life demands those things, and we are in no position to refuse or defer those demands. But in the spaces between those demands, I wonder if we can find an unproductivity, a stillness, a dullness even, that calls our attention to nothing much. And in doing so, helps us find fulfillment in the midst of all the chaos.