BORE YOURSELF STIFF AND FIND TIME AND A NEW LIFE

BORING BLISS

Health Promoting Boredom to Balance Our Concept of Time

Time flies when you are happy !! That´s what we have been told but, sadly, noting much of the other side of the coin. Time also flies when you are stressed out without any possibility to pause, when you are daily struggling with trying to live up to all the demands, the expectations and the must-do´s while exhausting yourself to look fresh, well exercised, with uberdefined muscles, fit and collected like nothing in the world could move your balance, aging process or a general and increasing ignorence of your worldly accomplishments. No matter how intense the speed, the seconds, somehow, have turned into nanoseconds and an hour is felt like ten hasty minutes....

Time is a feeling.

Yes, I know that it furthermore is a lot of scientifically determined phenomena, all of them correct (so far ) and yet, it says so little about the inner cosmos which we experience apart from the other one....By looking at a star you know that you are looking at something that is no more and, yet, there it is. I mean what we can perceive with our senses are the optimal criteria for rationalism concretisized and a proof of existence. Poor Schopenhauer....What a dilemma.

Sense and Sensibility...Do they ever concur?

In the seventies when the idea that time did not exist or the idea that everything was taking place in the same moment, we entertained the idea that we were alive and kicking while the Mammuths were majestically roaming the tundra, Jesus is preaching in the temple, Alexander the Great is quarreling with his mother Queen Olympias in an icy palace in Macedonia and Gaia, the earth mother, is fully occupied with molding the Italian peninsula and separating Pangea, the mega continent into various parts.

I am still entertaining that hypothesis to a degree and have not found anyone who gave anything remotely intelligent to say to contradict me. Maybe I am surrounded by idiots or I simply am the stubborn mega idiot myself. That thought does not disturb me however. Before I am run over by all quant physicists and what not, I hastily (timegenerated) swift to the subject of how I experienced a sleepless night with my firstborn screaming at the top of his lungs from nine in the evening until eight in the morning. Timewise, I mean. How do I perceive time in this context?

And what happened between this incident and her first night out with an acne spotted young akward man driving off in an old Dodge to, God only knows, what horrors until she safely returned before two o´clock in the morning? What happened in between? And did we really spend endless time on our first night out ? Why, when comparing, do I find that my own first night out happened but yesterday and that nowdays professional public servants looking fourteen politely ask me if I am entitled to retirement benefits when buying a ticket on the local bus ???

If I avoid my glasses and dare to look into a mirror I do not look a day older than fortyfour and, thank Heavens, I seldom find my glasses, my eyesight is getting poorer, and I can continue to laugh at Botoxaddicts but some part, deeply repressed in the inner me is fearing the lines  which soon will define me.  I know, because of the growing ageism, that I will be at the bottom of the ladder....That is not a very pleasant place to be. But then again, if you fall it is not that far to hit the ground...A consolation since we all will have to ground sooner or later..

One strategy to cope with the stampeeding time is to turn off all gadgets and audiovisual devices and get a good lenghty bore.

When skillfully executed you get a comforting feeling of being totally uninteresting, even to yourself, mysteriously eternal and floating and that time is an illusion. Stay put as long as possible, totally freed of any kind of distraction, positive or negative, and time is sure to transcend into another dimension. After staring into an off-white wall without any decorations for initially an hour, you will find washing the dishes an amazingly interesting chore and giving you a sense of purpose in life..And you have started your journey to experience a day as generous in terms of time.

Teach your children to be bored and watch them grow in personality, creativity and common sense even with the initial mayhem accompaning such radical parental or grandparental pedagogical interventions!  Fantasy and creativity are triggered off in a young and an old brain, and, yes, knowing that this is a safe and reliable technique to speed up cerebral growth and plasticity the sky is no longer a limit.

"Live fast ! Don´t last" is a mantra which belongs to the James Dean and Jack Kerouac era and that was quiete a long time ago....

Bore yourself stiff and you may even find your obnoxious neighbour surprisingly interesting and may be genuinely eager to listen to why your aunt´s varicosus are a perfectly suitable topic of conversation on Thanksgiving or Sunday family dinner.

Repeatedly introduce recurrent short intervals of the silent game in social life and you will be amazed by the decibels when the ten minutes of holding tongues are over. People seem even prepared to listen to whom they are talking to, freed from the stressful akwardsness of social demands of oozing charm and entertainment skills every second by the chlorine stinking poolside with a glass of poisonous Mojitos in your meticously manicured hand.

Take a twelve months leave of Restylane fillers and Botox and learn to recognise each other by personality and not by which Plastic Surgeon you consult, men and women alike.

Discover a life without hairextensions ! Experience and savour the time consumed when you only need a quick combing through and some lip stick or applying a masculine deodorant and skipping the tie.

It is time to travel to very distanced vacation resorts with inadequate or virtually no infrastructure, no exceptions for the tourists with regards to religious rules, strict dress code and social decorum and you will return with another outlook on life no matter if you were bored stiff for three weeks. You may have gotten used to the silence, the pace and the void of distractions and even be overcome by the mayhem of sounds and sights on the return that keep you in check from rushing the closest shopping maul to mingle with strangers and buy what you probably will have forgotten a week later.

Let us take giant step and compare, by own experience or learning by documentals, the life of the Hunter and Gatherers in the Amazon Basin and the pace of life where some 70 percent of the time is spent in braided hammocks, chit chatting, giggling, sleeping, digesting, telling stories or simply shutting up, or the seemingly endlessly timeconsuming preparations of simple food and the laid back hunting and fishing techniqus which will suffice to feed the family and the village. How boring can it get ?

Why are they so prone to laughter and why do they take every chance to tardy ritual dancing with monotonous chanting and movements for hours on end ? When asked about their life span they often answer that they live long lives. Still, the life expectancy may be forty plus. Well, since hurrying is virtually non-existing, forty years may be highly sufficient and not a tragedy....The afterworld is not questioned so the general concept is a cross over to the ancestors who have passed on and time no longer matters.

Time totally looses any sense from our point of view when it comes to the Australian Aboriginals. They genuinly live in more dimensions without being psychotic. Death is a fantasy to them since they experience they can cross the border and return to life on a daily basis. Idiots ? I think not.

”Time Is On My Side” sang the Rolling Stones with an implicit warning to the older generation if it were going to try to stop the new Occidental youth-oriented "revolution". Sadly, after a decade of no norms at all they hastily returned to Armani suits, Yuppie Gucci briefcases and Le Corbusier copied homes and, if they still are alive, I am very sure they have become a generation of grumpy old women and men...

Already at fifty many start to ponder on where the time between twenty and fifty has gone. Still waiting to take the leap of faith decided at twenty to do something truly radical, adventurous and magnificent that was repeatadly postponed. Just couldn´t find the time. How come ? The time was there ! All the time. We made choices, no matter our excuses. Or choices were made for us. And time went by.....

Only scientists and the savants-wannabe´s dryly find it painstakingly obvious that the star which twinkles in our bewildered eyes at night does not exist. It does. Because I see it.

Take a break ! Have a bore ! Find out that life becomes more alive  and colorful after a bout of boredom!

Just a thought

Love

Douglas