Empty your mind of all thoughts.
Let your heart be at peace.
Watch the turmoil of beings,
but contemplate their return. Each separate being in the universe
returns to the common source.
Returning to the source is serenity. If you don’t realize the source,
you stumble in confusion and sorrow.
When you realize where you come from,
you naturally become tolerant,
disinterested, amused,
kindhearted as a grandmother,
dignified as a king.
—Tao Te Ching, Ch. 16
Meditation is ‘boring’ by all conventional modern standards. I mean, you’re just sitting there. To an observer, you appear to be doing nothing. But doing nothing is still doing.
Most of the time, you’re doing something. Many of these somethings are important activities. But what if, in order to be able to do the somethings with excellence and precision, you need to occasionally do nothing with your full attention?
That’s how I feel about meditation these days. I’m merely balancing out external action with some internal action. Your energy and attention is finite. If you direct all of it towards the world ‘out there’, you neglect the world within. If you direct all of your energy to your inner-life, you miss out on the material world.
I took a break from meditating earlier this year. After a few weeks I noticed things that used to not bother me— a slow business day, a disappointing restaurant meal, traffic— were suddenly very powerful experiences capable of absolutely driving me up a wall. Woo! My anger was back, baby! I was not interested in stoking that old flame. Soon thereafter I started meditating again, and things lightened up. I’ve thought a lot about why.
It’s good to avoid extremes. Purely inner life (asceticism) and purely outer life (hedonism) are both extremes. Balance comes when we cultivate both sides of life, allowing for a symbiotic relationship to develop between them.
Strengthening your inner-self improves your outer-self. Strengthening your outer-self improves your inner-self.
Which is what leads me to today’s topic— boredom. Everyone gets bored. Especially today, when it’s possible to stimulate all of your senses simultaneously 24/7 at high capacity. I mean, good lord, no wonder everyone’s dopamine levels are out of wack. At times, boredom is a natural feeling. It comes and goes. But when we grab onto it and ride it around, it comes to represent a minor failure in our inner-lives, as well as an important lesson.
When I grab onto anger, I picture myself holding onto its horns for dear life as it bucks me around furiously. I’ve lost control. When we grab onto boredom, it’s feels like trying to ride a 200lb giant turtle down the freeway. We have too much desire for control but feel stuck about how to use it.
One of the benefits of meditation that took me the longest to pick up on is understanding the meaning of this balance between inner and outer life. In inner-life, we sit with our thoughts. It’s reflection time. We let them come and go, we watch. But in outer-life, we often can’t do this. We have to act, we have to do things and participate in the flow of the world.
Boredom comes when our eyes are open and yet we feel like we have nothing worthy to do. The solution is stupidly simple— close them. Look within.
These days, if I feel bored, I meditate. I take the energy that’s just staring into space waiting for something to happen and use it to look within, to reflect.
When I do this it reminds me of the aforementioned balance between inner and outer life. We can look within at any time. The questions that float around tend to eventually answer themselves. And then, when we open our eyes and return to life as we know it, we do so with a slightly refreshed sense of what to do and how to do it.
Every single time I do this, it works. I feel bored, then I meditate, and then it vanishes. It just sort of jogs me out of my stupor. It would feel like magic if it wasn’t so reliable.
The ultimate lesson is that there is never a reason to be bored. Your mind is just sort of stuck in a limbo between inner-mode and outer-mode. Consciously choosing one mode, and switching back and forth, shocks you back into mindfulness. It turns off the dreaded autopilot switch.
After doing this regularly for some time I’ve realized there is always something to do, even if that thing is doing nothing. Doing nothing can have great benefits if we do it mindfully. But floating in mental limbo is a type of dying-while-living. We’re denying ourselves free will.
I tried keeping track of the things I felt drawn to do immediately after using meditation to release myself from the boredom cycle. Here are a few:
—Journaling / reflection
—Writing
—Reading
—Exercise
—Cleaning/organizing
—Answering emails
—Brainstorming business strategies / new ideas to test
—Picking one very specific topic, and researching it. (Iran-Contra?? UFO theories?? The history of Bhutan??)
I saw a post from a guy who decided 25 years ago to learn one word a day in a foreign language, and he said he can now hold a decent conversation in 8 different languages.
There’s literally always something to do. And if you feel there isn’t, meditate to let your mind refresh itself. And then get back to living. Life’s too short to be bored.
PS. My new book with Penguin is out!
Get it here. It’s not boring, I promise!