The art of being bored

There's a thin line separating the "all too serious" and all the "all too sad." You can walk on the edge, like a kid following lines on a sidewalk. Only then can you appreciate the solitude of a single cherry on a tree. When a five-year-old kid laughs loudly, happiness is distilled, purified, made airborne, and spread everywhere with the breeze. But only if you have a thin skin like a balloon, you can feel the happiness in the breeze. How endearing.

The biggest threat to our senses is the fear of boredom. I remember that, for the most part, I've written about extreme feelings. The pain, frustrations, anger, depressions. I've written so few times about all the other ones, the routine normal emotions. Of course, it's easier to feel the extremes. With little or no effort, they pop up in my heart, and I have to pour them out. It's easy. At the heat of the moment, nothing else matters. It's me, my emotions, and the feeling. The casual emotions, on the other hand, are slippery like a fish and transient like a breeze. It's easy to overlook them like they didn't happen.

Only when you're incredibly bored, yet embracing it, that you can feel your fingertips pushing against the armchair, you can feel the expectant eyes of a cat. Boredom makes you watch people's shoes on a bus and helps you notice how their characters have trickled down to their feet. Or maybe you feel the shoes have their own distinct personalities, some moving restlessly, some still like a rock, and a left shoe distancing itself from a right one, as if they're on bad terms.

Math hardly prepares one to become a good writer. Yet it has taught me that the total sum, matters more than each number. You'll drink tea for about 10x2x365x65=474500 minutes overall, pee for almost 85x365x5=155125 minutes, poop for a minimum of 85x365x15=465375 minutes, and so on. The sad 40320 minutes you were heartbroken, painful 28800 minutes in a hospital, the euphoric 7200 minutes after getting a job or married, are altogether 76320 minutes. So insignificant when compared to the 80x365x20=584000 minutes you can enjoy looking at the clouds or the blue sky or the falling snow. Alas, if we held these casual feelings closer to our hearts.