Bored in the Face of Shoulds

Are you ever bored? It’s actually rather easy to become bored. Most people do it at least once in their lives, some as often as several times a week. Being bored does not mean that you have nothing to do. Usually, it’s the opposite. You have things to do, but they’re not the things you want to do. They are the “shoulds”. I should unload the dishwasher. I should review my notes for the test (or meeting) tomorrow. I should take care of the thing I said I’d do today. But I don’t want to. Boredom, at least in this affluent country of the United States of America, comes more often from having something you should do and nothing really want to do. At least, not at this moment.

There are other boredoms, too. There’s the day-in-day-out boredom of being in a job that doesn’t challenge or excite you. There’s the boredom of waiting in line. There’s the boredom of life today being the exact copy of life yesterday and of life tomorrow. These boredoms are easy to take care of, though. For the first, find a new job. For the second, get a walkman or an ipod or hum under your breath. For the last, build and create your Future. When you create your Future, your tomorrow will be different from yesterday.

But back to the original topic – getting bored when there’s plenty to do, but you just don’t feel like doing any of it. It can occur even when there’s fun stuff to do (watch a movie, put together a puzzle, call a friend), but you’re just not in the mood for any of it. What do you do then?

Being bored is a huge time waster. You can sit on your butt and wonder, “What should I do?” Eventually, that will be answered for you, because you’ll have wasted an hour or more just sitting there, and you can no longer avoid all those shoulds that you had been avoiding before. You’ll have to do the laundry, because you have no more clean clothes. You’ll have to unload the dishwasher, because you don’t have any other clean dishes. You’ll have to review your notes, or at the very least it’ll become to late to do anything about it, and that “should” gets taken off your list anyway. So, what do you do?

You do the should. I know, I know. You don’t want to. The good news is, there’s a catch. That wasn’t the complete sentence, but I wanted to make certain you were paying attention. You do the should until you think of something you would actually enjoy doing. In the case of reviewing notes, that can be difficult, because when we are bored, our minds tend to wander, and that makes intellectual activity a problem. However, we are in luck in that there are very few times that any of us is plagued by just one should. Most of us have plenty of shoulds to go around. And if you’re just too bored to do the one that requires thinking, do the one that doesn’t. And if you don’t have one that doesn’t require thinking, I’m impressed. Because at that point, all your dishes are clean and put away, all of your laundry is done and put away, all your floors are swept or vacuumed, the pets and plants have been taken care of, there is no dust in your house, all of your bills have been paid and your checkbooks have been balanced, your toilets are clean as are your shower and tub, all your library books and videos have been returned, the groceries have been bought, your windows are washed, and your bed has been made. I don’t think that I’ve had all of those things happen in my home at the same time ever.

This is where a little planning can come in handy. Your Future is a wondrous place, and I’m certain that there are things that you can do to create it. Big things, little things, and medium-sized things. Make a list of all of the things you need to or want to do in order to create your Future and keep that list handy for when you get bored. Do one of those things, and if they’re all too big to do, use your boring time to make the steps smaller.

Do a should or do a creative step. Even if you are still bored when you’re done, at least you got it finished. Congratulations on that.