One of the most important things I’ve lost through the ‘boring apocalypse’ (Frank Turners description of the pandemic crisis) is the space to get past bored.
Holidays work best for this.
The time to just sit and be and not to be running around like a blue-arsed fly gives you the time to get bored and go beyond boredom.
For me that’s where creativity is, that’s where ideas are, that’s where the real work gets done.
It’s become apparent to me that in the last six months I’ve lost this despite the fact that I’ve been at home, despite the fact that I’ve been off clinical work for weeks and weeks and weeks.
The tendency to want to learn things draws us towards non-fiction when we have time to read but the real trick is to read fiction to create ideas and to give us pathways around the difficulties that we find.
Getting ‘beyond boredom’ is like getting beyond silence.
There is a space beyond silence where things happen but in order to get to that space you have to sit in silence for a while, modern life prevents us from doing that as it constantly asks us to pick up our phone.
Last week on holiday I had enough time to sit in the day and read a book (and fall asleep now and again) the book I read was the new David Mitchell book Utopia Avenue which I’ve not finished yet but so far it’s utterly brilliant as I would have expected it would be (thanks very much Ross for buying me that).
It’s not non-fiction, it’s fiction.
It’s a journey back to a culture in the 1960’s that I never experienced but what it did was allowed me to understand what was important to me and the place where I want to go (regardless of the potential consequences) for the next 2 years as I get older.
Running at a sprint for 9 months of this year to protect my ‘position’ lost the ability to sit back and look at things from a higher point and a wider space.
Regardless of what it takes I will return to that now.
Blog Post Number - 2478