Journal Power: How to Conquer Boredom

I love using journaling to dissect and analyze things. All kinds of things, like my friends, my fears, dreams, and experiences.

One of the most powerful ways journal writing can change a person is when it's used to look at boring things.

Are you bored and listless sometimes? Insane as it seems, even though our world is obviously upside down and life is totally unpredictable, sometimes we feel like nothing ever changes. Sometimes the air doesn’t move, the scene outside the window is static, our problems persist, we continue to make the same old mistakes, other people continue doing the same irritating things. 

Sometimes I wonder if the happy life is simply a matter of keeping yourself entertained! Boredom is a killer. Whether I’m pursuing a skill, following a story, solving a problem, working toward a goal, or battling an enemy, as long as I’m not bored there’s hope. 

Boredom says there’s no hope, no curiosity, no appetite. It’s nothingness supreme. 

Little kids get bored often, complaining to Mom or Dad, "That's boring!" "I'm bored!" As we age, boredom occurs to us less and less. There are too many pressures, too many ambitions! 

Still, every one of us – no matter what age – confronts the emptiness of existence now and then. We stare into the abyss. We know the impatience, frustration, and infuriating deadness of boredom. We glimpse a senseless void that makes everything else irrelevant.

 I think there’s a way to circumvent boredom – with your journal, of course! Try some of the following prompts the next time you’re bored: 

1. Think back over the past several hours. List your movements, thoughts, conversations, and actions. Make note of any high or low points. Mentally select one not-particularly-interesting moment during that time and write a detailed description of it. 
2. Sit down to journal in a public place that you like: a museum, a train station, a park, for instance. Focus very narrowly on a small slice of your perception – say, what you can see to your left, or how this place smells, or who you imagine that stranger is. Journal your impressions.
3. Repeat the above in your own home. Find the write place to journal and then, narrowing your focus, let your surroundings guide your pen. Journal about the old chair you occupy, the noises from the street, or the dishes in the sink. Soak in the ordinariness. 
4. Think of the most ordinary, boring thing you can imagine; like a bus commute, or brushing your teeth, or watching a commercial over and over. Immerse yourself in the imagining and then start journaling. Maybe you describe the boredom; maybe your pen runs wildly amok in the opposite direction. Just write, whatever it is. 
5. Select one thing that you do every day that is routine but you don’t hate it. Journal about the quiet enjoyment you find in its ordinariness. Do you actually enjoy your commute for its private thinking time? Do you like taking the garbage out every night, enjoying the fresh air and the mystery of the dark? Do you secretly love making copies at work, even though it’s boring, because it gives you a chance to slow down and re-group? 

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