I easily could’ve gotten up and done something, but I didn’t. Maybe I knew intuitively that being bored has its pleasant aspects. There was nothing that needed to be done and no place my presence was required. Today, I envy that girl with oceans of time to float around in. I always seem to have things that need doing or somewhere I need to be. Of course, to a certain extent this “having to” is a choice; nevertheless, at times I miss doing nothing.
I’m just not as good at being bored anymore. As an adult, you have so many fewer “in between” moments. Life forces itself into the days, hours, and minutes like spray foam. There are hardly any moments when you truly have nothing to do.
A delayed flight, a dentist’s waiting room, a delivery guy not showing up: I savor these situations. The no-man’s-land between now and soon is a gift of time. You could call it living in the moment, but I prefer to call it circumstantial mindfulness; you accidentally trip over the now.
Being bored is not the same as meditation or rest, activities for which you make time and on which you focus your attention. When you’re bored, there seems to be nothing worth your attention, nothing that is giving you energy. We are living from one experience to the next. Being bored is standing still. You might want something exciting to happen, something that titillates you—but nope, life is tedious and uninteresting. It isn’t necessarily a pleasant sensation; at times, it can feel more like being in a desert where the sun is shining down mercilessly. Without any distraction, without a fresh spring or area of shade to escape to, there is only what there is. And that can be inconvenient sometimes.
Precisely because we live a life rich with sensory stimuli, a little boredom is actually good for us.
With some patience, what is empty can fill up with reflection, daydreaming, creativity, or the simple acceptance that there is only nothing. I mean, how often do you really feel that emptiness?
Boredom is an exercise. An exercise in being with what is there and being able to amuse yourself with nothing more than your own thoughts, desires, and imagination. Your brain wants to be stimulated; that is how it stays active and constantly forms new cells. That’s how you automatically become curious and creative.
If you allow the boredom to be, you open the gates, as it were, between your consciousness and your subconsciousness, and you will hear your inner voice more clearly than if you allowed yourself some outside stimuli just so you didn’t have to feel the boredom. A four-hour train delay, for example, can be just as interesting as a ten-minute dedicated meditation; when you’re turned off, something is going on at a deeper level.
When you are having a bad day, allow boredom to happen. You will discover that if you will just relax, something will happen, if only something very small. There is now room for original thoughts; you get closer to yourself. Sometimes it can be nice to purposely provoke this state of mind. Why don’t you go and sit on a random bench in a random street in a random neighborhood without any distractions (leave your phone at home!). Don’t hang out at that hip coffee shop with the inspiring view. Find a place where nothing in particular stimulates you. Take a tour on a random city bus. “Nothing to do, nowhere to be, a simple little kind of free,” John Mayer sang, which is nicely put.
The Bore-Out
Strange but true: You can be totally unaware that you’re bored. And just as you can be not bored enough, you can be too bored. Maybe you aren’t having a lesser day because something has happened but because nothing is happening at all. A bore-out can be a problem as well, just like a burnout. You may recognize serious boredom via symptoms like this:
You derive less or no energy from the things you do.
Meetings, to-dos, routines: They weigh ever heavier and more like obligations, without feeling necessary.
You look for excuses to justify not doing what you’re supposed to be doing.
Your attention wanders in every direction; you’re a little suspended above reality.
You sleep more than you need.
Your body feels heavy and sluggish.
Recognize any of these? Take them seriously. This kind of boredom is like quicksand. It’s time to take matters into your own hands and explore what you need to do to regain your energy. Treat the symptoms (go for a walk, go to the movies, stimulate your mind), but also address the cause. Investigate where your energy is draining from and what you need to feel stimulated again.
// Do the Savasana
This is the only yoga exercise in this book
I’m just going to tell it like it is: Performing the savasana pose is practicing being dead. It’s also known as corpse pose because that’s how you’re lying there, like a corpse—on your back, no muscle tension, not doing anything at all. Except breathe, that is. You don’t even need to put on your yoga pants or whip out a sports bra. All you need is your focus, your body, and a place to temporarily lay your body down on the floor. Sounds easy, right? Wrong. While the pose itself may not be difficult to assume, experts and loyal practitioners have called it one of the most difficult yoga exercises. Because even though you are lying on your back doing nothing, it can feel as if you’re climbing Kilimanjaro, especially on a bad day. Total surrender and deep relaxation aren’t easy.
It starts with your body. Slow down your breathing; thoroughly relax your muscles until you are comfortable and no longer feel the constant, restless urge to wobble and to rearrange your body; do not squeeze your eyelids but allow them to fall shut… that is step one.
The savasana is relief for a stressed body. Your heart rate drops, the tension leaves your muscles, and your body starts to focus on its primary tasks of feeding, cleansing, and healing.
Once you manage to truly relax, it will feel as if the earth is carrying you.
However, the savasana is also, and perhaps primarily, a mental exercise in surrender, in relaxation, in calming your monkey mind. It is not the time to go over your day and prepare your shopping list, not the time to hold on to your thoughts and impressions; it is time for allowing them to freely flutter, without an active response.
There are no other yoga poses in this book because I myself am not a yogi. Yoga can do a lot for us, and if it appeals to you, it is certainly a practice worth investigating. For the savasana, I made an exception because this is the pose that has made the difference more than once in times when I didn’t know what to do with myself. As a cheerleader of allowing emotions to flow and examining life’s reality, I stubbornly sought ways to make that work during the period right after I got divorced. Below the surface, I felt all sorts of emotions bubbling. Often, however, I failed to break through my self-preservation armor. It was like a pimple that was already pushing and nagging underneath my skin, but couldn’t be popped yet. But whenever I lay in the savasana position, fully surrendering myself, when my tight muscles relaxed, something deep inside saw its chance, and tears rolled down my cheeks. I went through that calmly, without judgment, surrendering to what apparently had to move. It was a release of negative energy. That’s how I let go.
Pema Chödrön rightly reminds us that we grow up in a culture that fears death and hides it. But death is all around us (we’ll talk about that more on p. 99). Chödrön writes about everyday dying: “We experience it in the form of disappointment, in the form of things that don’t work out the way we wanted. We experience it in the form of things perpetually being in a state of flux. When the day ends, when a second ends, when we breathe out, that is dying in everyday life.”
There’s a reason savasana is known as corpse pose: Each time you let go of an earthly trepidation, you die a little. Everything that lives arises from what has died before—life and death are inextricably linked. When you let go, something new will take its place. Trust this process.
You die a little bit when you give your ego a time-out. You die a little, because you leave the world for what it is. It’s a goodbye. And then? Where do we go from there? A restart. A reset. Isn’t that exactly what you need on a bad day? A chance to start over, lighter, m
ore carefree, if with only one grain of sand less heaviness in your heart.
How to Do a Savasana
On a lesser day, you can make the exercise as complicated or as easy as you like. Put on a yoga outfit and grab a mat and a blanket if you feel like it. You may also plop down on the floor in the office mail room in whatever you are wearing—it’s all good.
1. Ideally you create a cocoon: the light slightly dimmed, warmth provided by a blanket or a well-heated room, maybe some soft music. But a cocoon is not a requirement. Fluorescent lights you can’t shut off? It is what it is.
2. Make yourself comfortable. You may want something to support your head or the back of your knees; if you don’t have a pillow handy, it could just as well be your bag or a rolled-up vest.
3. Place your feet hip-width apart, heels loosely on the floor, and let your feet relax; usually they will fall to the side slightly, toes pointing out. Place your arms at your sides with your palms up.
4. Deeply breathe in and out. If necessary, do it theatrically: Take in a deep breath and exhale with a “fffffffff” sound. Try to release a little more tension from your body with each breath. Fake it until you make it, but breathe naturally. Forcing your breathing to slow down won’t work; calm your breath diligently but gradually.
5. Focus your attention on your body. Direct your mind from your toes all the way to your crown, without skipping a single part—each toe, the soles of your feet, your heels, your ankles, and so on. Guide your breath to wherever you feel restless.
6. Observe your thoughts in a calm manner. It’s impossible to stop thinking entirely. By the time you’re out of thoughts, you’re no longer in the land of the living. You can rise above your thoughts, however, by returning to a center, a point of attention. Visualize a pleasant place, as some sort of screensaver for your soul that you can always return to.
7. Allow emotions to flow without letting them carry you away. Observe them. Keep calm and always try to find the center, letting yourself be guided by your breathing.
8. After about twenty minutes, slowly start moving again by wiggling, moving, and getting active. You may also stay a little longer; this is your exercise, after all. But if you notice that your anxiety is increasing, cut the exercise short and try again later.
// Take Your Alone Time
You could safely lock me up in my house for a month and I’d be completely content. Secretly, I’m a hermit; I really enjoy being alone. As long as I have something to read, something to listen to, and something to eat, I’ll enjoy myself and often will even be happy. “Yes, easily said, if you also have a rich social life,” observed a critical friend. She argued that being alone by choice and being alone due to circumstances are two entirely different things. And that’s true. Being lonely is also different from being alone. Loneliness has no counterbalance; the equilibrium has been disrupted. Being alone, as a choice, is about something else.
Receiving only external energy and stimuli will throw you off balance. You also need to have space to feel the stimuli coming from inside.
Imbalance is fertile ground for bad days. Often I have less attention to share than is asked of me. Working full-time in a busy editorial office, I need to attend to press events and lectures and deadlines and friends and family and children and dentists, soccer practice, hairdressers, dinner parties, reunions, parent-teacher meetings, sports classes, and overtime, and it’s a never-ending grind. If I didn’t consciously choose to be alone every now and then, it would hardly ever happen.
Taking time for yourself isn’t always socially accepted. For example, my friends like to drag me out of my house because “What else am I going to do anyway?” And saying no to an appointment with a friend or for business because you want to say yes to an appointment with yourself remains difficult to explain sometimes; you have to be on the verge of a burnout if you want to be able to cancel for reasons like “me time” or “alone time.” I challenge you to do so anyway.
In her book Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes: “Long ago, the word ‘alone’ was treated as two words. All one. To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in oneness, either essentially or temporarily. That’s precisely the goal of solitude, to be all one.” It can be beneficial to isolate yourself. It removes all noise and brings you close to yourself. You can hear yourself think for a moment. I find that nothing is as nice as walking through a strange city or along a strange beach all by myself, anonymous and out of place. It gives me space to organize my thoughts, attune myself to my pure desires and needs, and become aware of the signals my body or mind want to give me.
Sometimes that leads to profound philosophical thoughts—and sometimes it leads to nothing special, except a deep sense of freedom. Time you spend with yourself is an opportunity to recharge. Even if you take fifteen minutes a day for yourself—taking a walk or sitting down by yourself—you will see that it brings you closer to that source.
I also like to start my working days on my own. I prefer to be at home for the first half hour to an hour, doing what I think is important, finding out what I’m going to focus on that day before I “hand myself over” and connect. Another favorite: going to the movies alone. You don’t need company there, in the dark, in silence. Nothing beats being absorbed by a story and afterward riding your bike home, alone with your own thoughts, without other people’s opinions or noise. Being comfortable with just yourself and being comfortable with others in equal measure is very important to me when it comes to personal growth and a meaningful life.
Spirituality is often about receiving energy, but it is just as important to shut yourself off from energy. For example, I am hypersensitive to sensory stimuli when it comes to sound. In a restaurant, I follow ten conversations at the same time, I hear ticking and murmuring and squeaking along with everything else. I remember putting on headphones with active noise cancellation for the first time in Los Angeles. It was as if I’d seen the light. “I will never have to hear other people ever again!” I said euphorically to the boy in his Apple shirt, who frowned. But I didn’t mean it that way: I loved and love that I have the choice to be with my own thoughts, even if I can’t isolate myself in a literal sense.
Finally, and this does not officially count as a shortcut unless you are now about to board a train or a plane, but I highly recommend traveling alone at least once—experiencing a strange environment, relying only on your own senses, beliefs, emotions, and thoughts for navigation. It has given me a strong foundation to discover that I can be in my own company and be perfectly fine. It strengthens your confidence in your own voice, and leads to deeper self-knowledge and a more pure contact with your intuition. This seems to happen faster and more intensely especially when you are in an unfamiliar environment. Whether it was a week in Melbourne in my twenties, or a trip across Iceland, or more recently wandering around Tokyo or spending a period in Los Angeles to write—I found it all equally inspiring and cathartic.
And yes, traveling solo can be uncomfortable. There is a kind of social stigma attached to it: Didn’t you have anyone to come along with you? It can be awkward to sit in a restaurant all by yourself. You have to know how to handle it. As I wrote before, this is mostly due to the confusion between “being alone” and “being lonely.” It is the difference between balance and imbalance in your inner world.
I also love to travel with others, which is very intimate and has a different vibe. But comparing the two modes of travel goes beyond the point I’m trying to make, that there are some very valuable aspects of traveling alone, including meeting new people who will allow you to show yourself as you are, without submitting to a single assumption or projection. Traveling on your own strips you of the layer of social dust that everyone collects, willingly or unwillingly.
Solo adventures work like a kind of soul-Swiffer: An encounter in a new environment, in a new context, can sweep your original self clean again.
Another valuable part of the experience is learning how to entertain,
comfort, help, and guide yourself. You can’t just shuffle along behind your traveling companions, half lost in thought; you need to be more alert and attentive to your environment. Your senses become more “awake”: You taste your food more vividly if you are not distracted by a conversation; the water feels different when you finally decide to take a dip; you hear the morning sounds clearly when no one is snoring. Maybe traveling by yourself to a far destination isn’t your cup of tea, but there’s always just a night in a new city. Give it a try.
I Have a Garden in My Heart
I can identify with a quote from Cheryl Strayed about being alone. She writes, “Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.” There are many names for that place deep within you, where there is no judgment, no time, and no pain. Your quiet space, some teachers call it. Or your sacred space. However cheesy, I myself prefer the term “the garden in my heart.” I like that image; I picture a walled, overgrown English garden, with wild flowers, knotted trees, and tall grass in which you can lie down and look at a clear blue sky. On hard days, it’s gratifying to imagine such a place, because sometimes an image can help you quickly reach a place inside yourself where you can be alone, even when, in fact, you are not.
// Just Sit with the Pain
The Handbook for Bad Days Page 6