Some moments are intensely vivid and pleasant. Other moments are intensely and vividly unpleasant, or, more commonly, unmemorable and weakly depressing for no reason. The types of experience can be separated, on lucky occasions, by a matter of seconds, and minimal change in external stimuli, which reveals the fraud or one or the other if not both.

While meditating for an ambitious seven minutes, I had a thought about this so interesting that it was kind of the end of my meditation. It was, this is why boredom is good.

(I had, in fact, been bored for hours before I started meditating: the seven minute sit was just the cherry on top.)

My theory is, boredom works like this: first, the mind rushes around stirring up dust and fetching pieces of flotsam and pointing at things and worrying, trying to find or generate something “interesting” despite the lack of novelty. This can go on for quite some time. But then it gives up. If the mind was a dog, it has lain down and rolled on its back with its tongue out, sleeping or dead.

This is when the Just Being™ starts.

(I know, I’m like two thousand years late to the party; and also, I’m already blogging about meditation after a seven minute sit with my belly full of whipped cream and chia pudding. Please ignore my lack of credentials; something my long-term readers have become skilled at.)

The thing about Just Being is that it is inwardly and outwardly pretty much like being bored, except it’s not boring. For whatever reason, top-quality Just Being feels more important, more intrinsically valuable, even more urgent that just (notice the lack of capitals) doing.

Boredom tends to produce daydreamy “good ideas” as the mind unspools, recombining recent impressions in potentially novel ways. When I go camping for a few days with no internet, I find that I am sometimes hot and bored and sweaty at first, and feel like I’m not “accomplishing” anything, but by the end, my whole life is reënchanted, and I return to civilization filled with ideas for new projects.

But I think the value of real boredom, as well as the best ideas, the ideas that are from a completely different frame — I should quit my job kinds of ideas, rather than here’s a way to do better at work kind of ideas — has less to do with the decaying pseudohypnagogic associative activity of a mind driven to distraction with boredom, and more to do with this sudden contact with reality when the mind gives up on being entertained.

This space intentionally left blank: