An Ode to Boredom

 

Well not quite literally.  I am no poet and I do not think anyone thinks of me as one.

So rather than an ode it is more a ramble.  Which I am quite proficient in I might add.

But I got to thinking of Covid and its impact on society on a recent phone call with my mother half a planet away.  She is computer illiterate having grown up in a generation devoid of too much electronics.  That is to say she is not surfing the WWW or sending status updates on her gum lines to make believe friends and followers.

Even electrical appliances were a luxury during her formative years and only recently did she send her first whatsapp message and still did not know what had happened.

So back to this Covid and its implications.  Boredom comes to mind right away.  I mean to find the world forced into stasis in a domino effect of rules and regs that cascaded from federal or central governments of the land to the local; people suddenly found themselves in varying forms of imprisonment.

So in talking to the woman that birthed me I realized that she did not mind the quiet of her life one bit.  The repetitive yet simple life did not seem to faze her especially with the recent unexpected loss of my father, her companion, to whom she was married for almost 60 years.

Buying food in grams to eat when needed is her lifestyle.  I buy stuff in pounds like we do stateside and then figuring out innovative ways to utilize that vat of ketchup becomes a first world problem.  That tedium is not something she has to contend.  But does the tropical torpor not bore her?  I try to gage that in our conversation because I myself am.  Bored silly.  My typical lifestyle is to earn enough to get on the road and gallivant.  Then come back to earn again.  I have not been able to accomplish said wandering for a solid eight months and counting.

She on the other hand has taken the covid in stride. Add to that some much needed dental work and she has found that she can spend time figuring out what foods could taste best in mushy form.   

All this coincided with a recent book I came upon.  Yawn - Adventures in Boredom.  Mary Mann takes us on a hilarious rendering of her research into this very poignant of subjects.

Speaking of travel one of the passage in the book points out that Mary got interested in boredom as a way to remain excited.  She found in her research that tourism as an idea stemmed from people’s sense of boredom.  Thomas Cook and the eponymous travel operator that recently shuttered was an idea that started with Cook, a cabinet maker and social entrepreneur (I am making up stuff here folks) asking folks in an English village to show up for a train journey 10 miles away for a shilling round trip.  He got 400 people to sign up. That was huge for the day and locale.

She observes that people are restless wherever they are and want novelty as a way to escape their sense of boredom.  In so doing they look up places online and come to expect some sameness along with the newness all in one when they visit a new place.

“As a result, I think we’re less apt to be surprised by places we visit, and possibly less patient with the people in those places” she observes.

She quotes a Caribbean writer called Jamaica Kincaid who wrote that locals look at tourists and “envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.” 

I can attest to that.  In a recent trip to Prague in Czech Republic my wife wandered into a beauty unguents and oil selling outlet in a mall and the cashier kept staring at her.  After few minutes of this non-interaction, at which point the wife was getting uncomfortable the lady cashier/store keeper approached her with trepidation and said “can I ask where you are from and what are you doing here”?   

I think part of her curiosity was to see a brown face walk into the store seemingly aware of the containers for sale and taking an interest in specific samples.  This in a place that typically no one has witnessed said demographic before. More so the clerk was fascinated that someone would leave their own land and come all the way to middle Europe to try out a hand cream.  The woman had not left her town ever in her 60 years and hence the awe. 

Mary’s book is a must read to break the monotony of not knowing what to do next.