◊ Listening to Boredom (continued)

Related to the fear of exploring the inner self that is required for healthy, soulful living, is the suspicion that lurks just beneath the surface of many bored person’s lives, namely, that the lives they are now living lack any deep significance, profound meaning, or ultimate purpose. However conscious or unconscious, it is the evasion of this suspicion that makes it doubly painful. Eventually, what is hidden must be brought into the light if there is to be any genuine understanding, redirection, healing, and growth.

It is not just the seemingly lethargic or aimless ones who unknowingly react to concealed or misidentified boredom, who are disconnected from a life-giving source, and who lack a direction worthy of their lives. It is also the pleasure seekers and the habitually driven, high-octane, success-oriented adults of today who are still susceptible to the same three temptations the Adversary used to entice Jesus in the wilderness: possessions, security, and prestige. The continual yearning for or compulsive pursuit of these enticements, commonly rationalized as the pursuit of happiness or signs of success or responsibility towards one’s family is in reality often just another attempt to outrun the boredom whose hot breath on our necks feels like death.

It is only by “changing the direction in which we look for happiness,” writes Thomas Keating, one of the contemporary architects of Centering Prayer, “that we can find a reliable way to true fulfillment.” It is one of life’s oldest and saddest ironies that those who are often the busiest being in pursuit of the most, not only already have more than they need, but also in the end are the ones who discover—often when it is too late– that what they have is transitory and hollow, and that what they gave up to get it was not worth it.

Not to be forgotten are those persons living in the autumn or winter of their lives. Behind them they leave a trail of personal and professional successes and failures, blessings and mistakes, dreams fulfilled and dreams deferred, disappointments and joys. Their ennui is often experienced in the struggle with identity, meaning, and purpose now that they have retired or after the loss of a life partner or feeling like a bystander as one’s friends and colleagues pass away.

Keating’s counsel is no more fitting than in these years. Perhaps because the longer we live the harder it is to be in denial. Growing older requires a particular courage. Rabbi Heschel notes that for some these years are often a time of anguish and boredom and unambiguously states that “the only answer to such anguish is a sense of significant being.” Emphasizing that with the curtailment of functions and activities comes the rare opportunity for inner growth, he views these years as a time “to attain the high values we failed to sense, the insights we have missed, the wisdom we ignored. They are indeed formative years,” he writes, “rich in possibilities to unlearn the follies of a lifetime, to see through inbred deceptions, to deepen understanding and compassion, to widen the horizons of honesty.” Most especially, he sees these years as a time to grow in wisdom, to tend to relationships, to practice gratitude, ritual, and celebration, to live with a sense of the Presence by whose generosity we come by these lives of ours, and to consecrate time (rather than wile away the time) by choosing that which genuinely enlivens our soul and draws us near to God. He writes:

Every moment is a new arrival, a bestowal. Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy. The moment is the marvel; it is in evading the marvel of the moment that boredom begins which ends in despair. . . . All it takes to sanctify time is God, a soul, and a moment. And the three are always there.*

PRACTICE:

Consider using as an Advent mantra:
Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy.

*Heschel quotes are from To Grow in Wisdom