Seven little lessons to rediscover our everyday life.
Seven days for the Creation... of a new perspective.
The well-known detail: The weekend has arrived. You have two days of free time at last, which you can use to: 1) do the cleaning; 2) set up the online payment of the latest bills; 3) organize that business dinner for next week; 4) clear the sink which is full of piled up dishes; 5) go to that concert even if you don’t feel like it, but you have already bought the tickets; 6) study the new offers from telephone providers; 7) visit your neighbours to maintain relations (which you’ve been delaying for weeks); 8) go shopping; 9) catch up with overdue laundry and ironing; 10) any other business. The two days are over in a jiffy. On Sunday evening, to chase away the shadow hanging over the back of your mind, you start watching that funny video on the Internet that everyone but you in the office has already seen. One video leads to another, and at three in the morning you’re still on your computer. It’s already Monday, and you’re more tired than before
The background: Even during free time you can feel anything but free. Caged as we are in our schedule, in a fragmented time marked only by planned and unavoidable duties, we tend to fill the hours with incentives and to keep our minds moving even when we have nothing to do; otherwise it seems to us we’re wasting our time. Rather than just sitting around doing nothing, we start playing a mini-game on the phone: to quit doing things is increasingly becoming a taboo today. The machine of the so-called late-stage capitalism demands from us that we constantly produce (or become products ourselves). Excitement does not stop for a second, there is no rest at all, there is no boredom. Perhaps it would be enough to learn the ancient Chinese art of “doing without effort”. For instance, the skilled butcher never sharpens his knife because he knows how to exploit the spaces inside the flesh, his blade passes through the cavities between the bones and never go blunt; yet if you ask him how he can cut so perfectly maybe he won’t be able to answer. Instinctively, and thanks to practice, this ninja-butcher has learned to recognize emptiness and fullness, he knows when to sink his knife and when to withdraw it, he is aware that the key is alternating effort and relaxation, doing and not doing. Even the God of Genesis, when on the seventh day he allows himself a little relaxation after the efforts of creation, is not just having a rest. He is completing his work through rest. Stasis is an essential moment of creating (and of creation), such a fundamental part that the seventh is the only day that God defines as sacred. Doing without doing, completing with rest: all this sounds very good on paper, but how does it apply to our everyday life? Help comes to us from an often misunderstood state of mind: boredom. A study conducted in 2013 by the University of Central Lancashire suggests that performing a repetitive and uninspiring task can sometimes influence creativity in a positive way. A group of 40 subjects was given a monotonous task consisting in copying phone numbers from a phonebook; on the other hand, a control group wasn’t asked to do anything. Subsequently, psychologists presented polystyrene cups to both groups, asking the participants to come up with as many uses as possible for these objects. Those who had been bored by copying telephone numbers found creative solutions which were definitely more original than the others. Boredom gives the mind an opportunity to rest, but also to fantasize. Scientists are convinced that mind wandering is essential for learning, developing creative thinking, solving problems, planning and simulating future events, and then making decisions.
The Seventh Lesson: Since we are no longer able to simply stop doing, here is a replacement exercise. Try to dedicate yourself to a long, repetitive and above all boring task. You can do whatever you prefer: dust your old collection of action figures, wash the dishes by hand, paint a wall – or even better, perform a completely useless activity. Do it without music, without notifications from your mobile phone, unconcerned about the result and enjoying this ancient sensation to the full. A little boredom is good for the organism, the mind and even philosophy (many thinkers, from Giacomo Leopardi to Bertrand Russell, have included it among the most sublime human feelings).
Therefore, claim boredom as a luxury or, better, an inalienable right! On Monday morning, when your colleagues ask you what you have done on the weekend, you can proudly answer: “I got bored, and I liked it.”