It was the first weekend in weeks that I didn’t have a ‘to-do list’ as long as my arm. And it poured rain all weekend. I’ll admit it, I’m a bit of a busy-ness addict. Feeding the ‘do-stuff’ monster is my way of keeping chaos at bay. Doing stuff makes me feel I’m in control. It’s like I’m keeping some corner of my world right and good and interesting or at least organized. So without the busy I got kinda bored. And bored is not right and good and it’s *definitely* not interesting.

I ran across this quote from Eckhart Tolle’s Stillness Speaks :

The mind exists in a state of “not enough” and so is always greedy for more. When you are identified with mind, you get bored and restless very easily. Boredom means the mind is hungry for more stimulus, more food for thought, and its hunger is not being satisfied.

When you feel bored, you can satisfy the mind’s hunger by picking up a magazine, making a phone call, switching on the TV, surfing the web, going shopping, or — and this is not uncommon — transferring the mental sense of lack and its need for more to the body and satisfy it briefly by ingesting more food. (ed. Eckhart what are you saying?? People eat out of boredom?? :-) )

Or you can stay bored and restless and observe what it feels like to be bored and restless. As you bring awareness to the feeling, there is suddenly some space and stillness around it, as it were. A little at first, but as the sense of inner space grows, the feeling of boredom will begin to diminish in intensity and significance. So even boredom can teach you who you are and who you are not.

You discover that a “bored person” is not who you are. Boredom is simply a conditioned energy movement within you. Neither are you an angry, sad, or fearful person. Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not “yours,” not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go.

Nothing that comes and goes is you.

“I am bored.” Who knows this?

“I am angry, sad, afraid.” Who knows this?

You are the knowing, not the condition that is known.

So I tried it. I just sat - for long periods at a time - like 10 minutes. Yup, that’s a stretch for me. I sat with the boredom rather than coming up with a next thing and rushing off to it. There was a part of me that was afraid I was going to sink into the Sunday blahs. It’s that hopeless feeling that there’s nothing more interesting ahead than Monday a.m.. But sitting with the boredom made it feel more OK. And I relaxed a bit. It wasn’t me, it was just a relaxed rainy Sunday.