The blessing of boredom

SIMON APFEL

Things have become very crazy very quickly. Those of us growing up in the West have been sequestered from global catastrophe to an extent that no other generation before us has. We’ve endured no great wars or famine. We’ve had a great recession, but no great depression. We got through SARS and Swine flu without too much upheaval. The climate emergency hovers ominously on the horizon, but has yet to really hit home.

COVID-19, though, has completely uprooted our lives. And now we’re all staying home.

It seems a lifetime ago that we marvelled at what was happening in Wuhan, at the millions of people locked down in their homes for weeks on end. But now it has become a lived-in reality for hundreds of millions of people across the world.

The truth is, for many in self-isolation or quarantine, the adjustment hasn’t been so extreme. We can work online, we can shop online, our kids can be schooled online. We have Netflix and eBooks and podcasts and Spotify and virtual museum tours to keep us occupied indefinitely. (If we didn’t realise before that we live our lives on our screens, we’re certainly realising it now.)

The problem, however, is what to do on Shabbat. Shuls have shut their doors. Dinner parties and big family lunches are off the table. Online Torah classes aren’t an option. Neither are Netflix, eBooks, podcasts, or Spotify. So what do we do with all that time to ourselves and no devices to distract us from boredom?

What we may not have considered is that for some, this is actually the opportunity of a lifetime. That being bored – spending hours in our own company, inside our own heads – may just be what we need more than anything else in the world.

Dr Michele Ritterman is a world-renowned psychotherapist. When I interviewed her recently on a podcast, she related that anecdote about Salvador Minuchin and the multiple personalities each of us have that opened this article.

Ritterman is a big advocate of the practice of talking to yourself as a means of connecting with these different facets of your personality – of discovering who you are, where you want to go, what you want to be.

“We constantly have these dialogues inside our minds,” she says. “When I turned 60, I asked myself, ‘What do I want to do?’ And my self said, ‘I want to sing.’ And then my self replied, ‘You’re too old to sing.’ And then I said to my self, ‘Mind your own business.’ When you have a healthy relationship with yourself, you’re able to listen to all the voices inside you, put them out in front of you, and choose the one that makes sense.”

It begs the question: with all these voices inside your head jostling for supremacy, who’s actually doing the choosing?

Ritterman calls this singular voice of reason, the “discerning you”.

“It’s a voice of discernment – the voice in you that’s the most neutral, most compassionate, empathic, most enlightened, most sophisticated, but also realistic. It’s both analytic and intuitive, and it’s all-encompassing. It’s your higher voice.

Not everyone knows how to tap into their higher voice, Ritterman says. Not everyone acknowledges these arguments inside their head or has any awareness at all of these internal dialogues. But, she says, you’re definitely better off knowing you have them, and that if you don’t acknowledge them, you’re going to have the arguments with other people.

Though not religious, Ritterman believes Shabbat is the ideal opportunity to tap into the higher voice, the “discerning you”, and to engage in these inner dialogues.

“We need time off the clock,” she says. “A sense of mental spaciousness, ‘subjective time’, where everything is slowed down, and we see things extremely clearly. We need a Sabbath – a real Sabbath where we are alone with our thoughts, but not alone, where we aren’t consumed with the mundane matters of this world.

“Subjective time, Sabbath time, is your time – time between you and you.”

A few months ago, pre-coronavirus, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to indulge in some real subjective time. I was home for Shabbat, my family were elsewhere, and I was simply too lazy to go anywhere or see anyone.

I lit candles on my own. I ate dinner on my own. I got pleasantly inebriated on kiddush wine on my own. I spent the next day in pyjamas, just sitting on the couch. A lot of that time was spent reading, but a lot of it wasn’t.

For hours on end, I let my mind wander, going where it took me, following its meanderings to no place in particular.

Letting go, I let multiple voices make themselves heard and had countless conversations. Sometimes I got clarity and direction, as my higher voice – my voice of discernment – emerged from the babble. And sometimes, the babble played out unresolved.

Through the boredom, I uncovered and communed with my multifaceted self, revelling in my own company. And through the boredom, I sensed the silence and stillness at the heart of all things. I also slept of course – heartily. And my sleep was filled with dreams and visions.

On the surface, it was a quiet Shabbat, completely uneventful. In reality, it was the most momentous of my life.

On Shabbat, many of us will be in complete isolation, cut off from friends and even family. The temptation will be great, but I would encourage you to forget podcasts and series and online shopping. Forget Netflix, and just chill.

You will be bored out of your mind. And it will be the best thing you ever do.