Hello Hello listeners. Happy Monday! It's a brand new week again and here we are bright and early to kick it all off together! I'm Coach Kate and I host this space weekday mornings where we dive in and explore a quote, a perspective, maybe some motivations or some dive into some gratitude together. If that sounds like a space you want to be a part of, go ahead and give me a follow and we can dive into all these things together weekday mornings.
This morning I wanted to dive in and talk about the importance of boredom. So much of our daily lives is filled up to the brim of something taking our attention. We rarely allow ourselves to be bored-- merely satiated in content, news, podcasts, and more. So many little things that we don't even remember take up our time and our mental space so that we don't have to sit with the discomfort of being bored. When I was a kid, if I dared to let it slip to my grandma that I was bored, she would tell me that it was only because I was boring. I used to get soooo offended by this statement, and it took years of diving into what it meant to be bored and also discovering the gift of working your way out of it. The truth is, there are endless possibilities for our time, attention, work, and more in this life. When we say to ourselves that we are bored, we automatically limit ourselves because of our mindset-- not because of the lack of possibility. Sometimes we simply aren't being creative enough, or found the right things to ignite us. Nowadays too, we placate these uncomfortable bored feelings with being consumers of media instead of creators of our own lives. It is a gift to sit with the boredom and really try to dive into what ignites us as human beings in a universe full of possibilities. Boredom is merely a displacement of energy, and we can tap into that energy to create something for ourselves that has meaning.
So there were a lot of wonderful quotes on boredom out there, and it was hard to choose just one, but I finally settled on a great one from none other than the brilliant German philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche. Here it is:
“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”― Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche has so many layers to this simple quote here and I really wanted to dive into this and explore with you all those layers. Boredom is interesting because it is an indicator that time is passing and that there's unused energy. Sometimes we don't want to acknowledge that our time here is finite, and we reason with ourselves that if we distract ourselves with meaningless tasks and activities we could trick time into pausing or not marching forwards as it does. On another perspective of this quote, the world is full of endless things to dive into and discover for ourselves, externally, internally, and even spiritually. The problem is two things: One: we rarely allow ourselves to get bored enough to really figure out how we want to spend our limited time on this little blue rock floating through the universe. and Two: when we are bored we sit with only the emotion of not being satisfied instead of really asking ourselves how we want to spend our time meaningfully. And that is exactly how we get around both sides to this conundrum on boredom. When we ask ourselves how we want to spend our time, we hold ourselves accountable not only in the moment, but we put that accountability in action with this thought. When we sit with that discomfort that is boredom, and allow it to tell us about what we want to do instead, we then open that door for creating meaningful steps ahead.
Now this isn't about rest, or spending time mindlessly, those are important too. This is about recognizing that uneasy desire to create or do, and being not sure about where to put that energy. This is about recognizing the energy and figuring out where to direct it ahead. When we direct that energy in small, mindless ways, we break it into a million tiny pieces that don't add up to meaningful progress along the way, and we often don't have much to show for it. However, if we acknowledge the feeling: I am bored. We then can also ask ourselves, how do I want to spend my time meaningfully? This is about taking that restless energy and turning it into something magical.
So today, this wonderful start to the week. Next time you feel bored, recognize it as unused energy telling you something about what you want int your life and especially your CAPACITY to do it.
Boredom is just your unused potential energy in the vast magic that is our life in this infinite universe.
If you use it like a tool, or recognize it as a messenger about your unused capabilities-- you'll never be bored again in your life.
I'm Coach Kate. This has been another episode of Minute Explorations. If you liked what you heard today, give me a follow, and if you want more, feel free to listen to my other talks underneath the talk tab in my profile, or even follow along and subscribe to my daily newsletter linked in my bio. Thanks again for listening and I hope next time you feel that familiar pang of boredom, you seize it as an opportunity to create your life. Thanks again.
