I met a friend of mine after ages. He asked me a question. “In what way have you not changed since I last saw you in 2009?”

My propensity to boredom. How often I get bored. How often I act out of boredom. How it spurs me to do all sorts of things. How it remains a hurdle in me fulfilling my potential because I always get bored before crossing the finish line.

It’s a part of me that I have never really liked. It’s a feeling that I always run away from. Towards a stimulating activity — eating, working out, dance, trolling. More lately, writing 🙂

But before I can get fulfillment from the stimulating activity, I am bored again. Desiring something else to stimulate the senses.

I think it’s currently the biggest hurdle I face in my growth with a direct influence on my tendencies to binge eat, to leave projects unfinished, to maintain a disciplined workout routine, have fulfilling friendships and relationships.

So an intention I set for myself recently was to conquer boredom. No longer be a slave to it. Defeat it.

I got excited at that idea. I saw a grandiose vision of never being bored again in my life. As if my life would soon be a perfectly ordered sequence of stimulating activities, where the next activity starts right before the boredom kicks in with the earlier one. Or me being able to work mechanically on whatever I set my mind at without experiencing any boredom.

Such silly visions, both.

Jacqueline helped me with an EFT session the last time I was feeling a surge of boredom rising in me. It contributed in changing my perspective of how I look at boredom. Less as a foe. More acceptance and adaptation. In hindsight, this paraphrasing makes complete sense and fits in with the axiom of “acceptance as a path to change” that I fully buy into. I suppose it took a while for me to accept it as a strategy because the feelings associated with boredom trigger a past active self within me which snoozes my observer state of mind because that state did not exist at the time when this past active self was molded. I grew up in a joint Indian family which had a quintessential Indian problem of the mother-in-law not getting along with her daughter-in-law arguably because she didn’t want to share her son’s attention? But really because India in the 80s and 90s was an odd society that was firmly conservative but was gradually opening up to western ideas and some women (like my mom) had fully assimilated western notions of independence and self-reliance that clashed with existing social structures. When faced with this conflict between two women I deeply loved, I did not respond well. It was a feeling of helplessness that perhaps contributed to emotionally closing up and resorting to food as a distraction. I say this with a grain of salt because it’s really hard to actually figure out things about your past with certainty. The past is but a hazy fog in your brain which remembers selectively and can be soft programmed to even alter memories and recollections which remains an argument against hypnotherapy. I also feel hesitation at exploring this line of reasoning lest it comes across as blaming those who raised me so lovingly. Disclaimers aside, perhaps that same feeling of helplessness gets triggered when I can’t keep myself busy?

Now I’m visualizing my propensity to boredom as a small part of me instead of a foe. A child that wants my attention but I always get annoyed when he expresses that desire and I neglect him. And he keeps coming back. And I keep neglecting him. I now desire to work on activating the observer state of mind when I sense boredom creeping up next.