◊ Listening to Boredom (continued)
Everything that happens to you is your teacher… the secret
is to learn to sit at the feet of your own life and be taught by it.
~ Polly B. Berends ~
The cyclic tragedy of it all is that too often easily bored children grow up to become unconsciously bored grownups who raise easily bored children or, if you prefer to start at the other end of the cycle, emotionally cataleptic adults often house equally bored children who grow up to become bored adults. A poignant example of this is seen in Rick Moody’s novel which was later made into the 1997 film The Ice Storm, a devastating portrayal of the spiritual anomie and suburban ennui that plagued upper middle class Connecticut couples and their derivatively and correspondingly lost children in the winter of 1973.
Set over a Thanksgiving holiday and culminating in an impending, ominous ice storm, the story focuses on two families. The movie documents their lifeless lives, detached relationships, casual choices, and the destructive and tragic consequences of those choices. Suffering from the hypothermia of boredom brought on by hollow affluence, the characters seek escape through marital affairs, alcoholism, secrecy, drug use, and sexual experimentation. Young and old alike are emotionally and spiritually freezing to death unaware that the storm outside is merely a reflection of the icy condition that is slowly killing them from within.
If we pay attention and don’t too quickly freeze the focus and condemnation on Connecticut suburbanites in the 1970’s, all is not lost. The boredom of the children of comfort and their comfortable but incognizantly bored parents is a warning we all need to heed. That we work so hard to cram our lives so full and yet remain so unfulfilled hints at the hollow in the soul that lies hidden in us and runs deep as a backyard sinkhole. In our adult, success-driven, consumer society, largely comprised of graying or balding baby boomers, those who have been the busiest producing, achieving, consuming, acquiring, amusing and justifying themselves are often secretly the most bored and the most terrified of facing and feeling the full force of their boredom.
Unconscious and unexamined boredom are both the symptoms of unhealthy adult faith and the nemeses of healthy mature faith. Often their source is fear. Too often this fear also goes unacknowledged and unnamed. I suspect as much as anything, what hides beneath the fear bored people ignore are three things. First, they fear healthy introspection or soul-searching. Second, they fear the painful acknowledgment that they are living lives without meaning or purpose. Third, they fear death and facing their mortality.