Breathe It Out and Maybe Consider Taking an Edible

This is not breaking news to anyone who has a sense for my energy but I am not what most would call a “chill” person. I have absolutely zero chill and therefore feel agony from the act of doing nothing. I’ve been meditating to remind my brain what it’s like to not have this impulse to aimlessly sprint through life. My overactive legs are ready to run laps, screaming, “Do more! Do more!” while my brain is like, “Shhhhhh, baby girl. Breathe it out and maybe consider taking an edible.” 

Meditations either resonate very deeply with me or I sit for fifteen minutes, mad at myself that no matter how hard I try, I can’t imagine my legs are tree trunks rooted into the Earth- for fucks sake. Or I can’t feel the sunbeams shooting out of my armpits to lift me by my inner light. The meditation I’ve been doing for the last week requires a more approachable visualization- a soothing voice reminds me that I am “a fragmented being and asks me to collect all the pieces of myself I’ve ever left behind somewhere, collect them and invite them to join me where I am now.” Okay, it’s still extraordinarily crunchy and woo-woo but I can’t deny I’m a fragmented person. 

This particular meditation felt like one of those three hour movies where you go on some eye-opening journey, get to the end and you’re pissed to learn the whole plot is actually based on a day dream some guy is having while zoning out at a bus stop. In just 15-20 minutes, I managed to go collect every major piece from life chapters I ran towards out of boredom or stuck-ness. 

London- I created a business purpose for me to be in the U.K. so I could chase a professional fuckboy, fantasizing about a life in the St. Albans countryside, holidays in Cornwall. (Sending you all my love, Robbie.) I even developed a Madonna-cringe-worthy English accent that I thought was super convincing. A nice bloke asked me for directions one day and I helped him so confidently, I was sure it was a sign that all of me belonged in sweet England. The more bored I was, the harder I pushed for London to become some part of my quiltwork, until we found ourselves in a square peg-round hole dynamic that resulted in heartbreak, normalized anxiety and a concerning absence of vegetables in my diet.

Mountains - I started climbing mountains in my early twenties and spun a whole identity out of it. I went through several months of first-aid training and avalanche preparedness and felt like a Mortal Kombat character wielding an ice axe. Mountains consumed me. I woke up at ungodly hours every weekend to go climb something. Anything. Muddied boots, red Patagonia puffer, matching lipstick and a proper coming-of-age movie soundtrack for the drive out- songs they play in movies when a captive prisoner sees daylight for the first time. Alright, too dramatic, I know. But I gave most of myself to mountains, and anything left over, I saved for my poor husband who had to wait for me to regain feeling in my body after the right number of miles I had to hike before I felt mighty enough. Every Saturday, a 4am alarm. He’d beg me to sleep in, just once. The nervous tick in my ankles required me to wake before the bears and pep talk myself through problems I most likely created in my mind - because I was bored and dirt on boots was my therapy.

Australia- I took off to Sydney, Melbourne, Noosa, Lorne and Byron in search of God knows what. Pretty pictures, a morning surf and proper avo toast. My romance with Australia was the wussie version of Eat, Pray, Love in a country of all English speakers and American resources. For example, I wandered too far down the coast one day and was still able to call an Uber. I returned back to the states just after Christmas, skipping over all the holidays that most are obligated to spend with family. Sitting just a few feet from Chris Hemsworth and his gorgeous family, I swore that I was pregnant from eye contact and needed to stay in Byron indefinitely. To stay would have been a fantastic escape from my beloved mundane. To this day, Byron Bay is the place I go to when some voice in a meditation, or any voice, tells me to go to my happy place. Australia was exactly what I needed and it’s not a horrible thing that I left so much of my barefoot self there. And it’s only moderately obnoxious how I never miss an opportunity to refer to Australia as “Oz” anytime I meet an Aussie in Brooklyn.  

New York- My move to New York was the one escapade born from boredom that I intentionally sunk myself into, becoming a chameleon in a place that I believe was always meant for me. New York hasn’t defined me the way I was sure Australia, London or mountains would. When I’m bored or lonely, the thing I crave most is someone to share air with and that’s what this city has become for me. We share air, we can be comfortably silent and bored together in a romantic way, one that doesn’t feel like I’m sitting on my hands to keep my skin from unzipping from my bones and running towards all the things I feel like I should or could be doing. 

A lot of effort and money goes into avoiding boredom. In each of these “life-defining” escapades, I was extremely bored and restless and the fragments I left behind weren’t actually life defining at all. With the exception of New York, these were people, places and whims I let define me for a minute, but they also served their purpose. In every frantic fit disguised as adventure, I was hiding from my wonderful life in places where no one knew me unless I let them. And the version they were introduced to was a bored, fragmented being. Following each of these spontaneous breakdowns, I entered a dark season of quiet, mundane, truly boring transformation. The moments of doing nothing and getting quiet were some of my most important. I went towards whatever I thought was missing, reached my state of boredom successfully and then, in some ass-backwards way, began to rebuild the missing pieces back into my life. 

To bring this back to the present, I’ve been bored. So fucking bored.  I’m in one of these quiet seasons right now- open schedule, mundane day to day, feeling hyper aware of my loneliness. The boring transformative months in hiatus from doing all the things are preparing me for bigger things, reminding me it’s a blessing to be bored. 

We’ve spent a whole year and some change trying to creatively cure boredom and it's not lost on me that in the last few months, I’ve complained about being bored, lonely, over and under scheduled and uninspired- Goldilocks and the many hours to kill. Today, I started a one-woman cooking segment I call “leftovers in my fridge but let's try it on a cracker.” Here’s hoping that never makes its way onto social media and if it does, send help. 

To bring this all home- be bored. Be grateful for that boredom. There’s likely some sort of scientific benefit to boredom that I don’t care enough to Google. For the record, I don’t think boredom needs to be this momentous growth opportunity that causes a switch in your brain to flip and suddenly you want to skip off to a foreign country and run towards your shiny unknowns. Boredom is where your brain pauses long enough to remind you of things you keep saying you’ll do or things you’ve always wanted to do, it’s where we set goals, get inspired and fired up to do something productive with all that Type A freakshow energy. Dear world, I am an anxious person with a constant need to be stimulated and I have experimented plenty and speak from anecdotal experience- being bored with your thoughts is good for you. Even though I’ve made a picturesque hobby out of it, you don’t get to outrun the discomfort that comes with feeling bored. In my most soothing meditation voice- give your boredom a hug. Here’s the thing- life is wonderfully boring most of the time. The goal is to do a manageable dance between stress, excitement and nothing at all. Try this for me- put “Do nothing” on your to-do list. Dig through your fragments and smile at every happy accident you found yourself in because you got bored and slowed down long enough to serenely exist. Breathe it out, and if all else fails, maybe consider taking an edible.