Where do I feel my next evolution is?

It’s in being bored again.

So I was listening to this podcast here about personality types (I’m an ENFP) and it said that one of the highest forms of self love for my type is to simply practice being bored more often.

That was a gut punch to the heart.

Because I knew it was true. And yet I didn’t want to believe it.

Just yesterday my husband and I were working on a home art project and I found myself in tension in my body knowing that it wasn’t going to be completed that day.

We spent hours and hours doing this project on a Sunday and it wasn’t going to be completed?! We spend all this time in one day on one specific thing, only to not cross the finish line?

My husband reflected back to me that the creative process is the point. The process is the point.

What a man he is, but that’s a conversation for another post…

You could say that my soul and my type has always been destined for a range of texture. Can you relate?

I daresay this is just my personality type, this is also simply being a human being who is connected to their heart and soul.

I love the outdoors. And food and art and music. I also love finance and business and large retreats and events. I love disappearing into the woods like a dirt bag and I love eating escargot in Paris. I love family and traditions and I resist modern culture in many ways.

And yet when I became a mother almost 7 months ago, the way that looked and presented itself in my life really started to change.

I felt the longing and the pings for that varied texture of life, but I didn’t know how to access it in this new body and mind of mine.

I felt the impulse for texture and I realized that I couldn’t hold it to the capacity that I once could.

A newer kind of strength and varied superpower was developing.

My desire for a slower way of being and thinking.

Over 2,000 years ago, somewhere in Rome, stoic philosopher Seneca documented a crisis of the mind: “How long the same things? Surely I will yawn, I will sleep, I will eat, I will be thirsty, I will be cold, I will be hot. Is there no end?” Seneca was bored.

In Out of My Skull. They define boredom as the uncomfortable feeling of “wanting to do something, but not wanting to do anything.”

As I explore ideas of what boredom means to me, I think about my desire to interact with things without having to seek reward. I want to be more in the ethos of the process of things versus the idea that everything needs to be taken to a sense of completion.

And I’ve dug deeper, at the core of my resistance to boredom is also this belief that it makes me lazy.

Ew, dare I be lazy! Dare I be human! Dare I actually find some of the deepest power in actually being bored?!

In motherhood, I want to model for my son the idea that the point of life is to be in process and to be present and attuned to the journey.

I now am continuing to see boredom as a superpower and as a way to reclaim the boundaries and full textures of our lives without having to prove anything.

So how am I exploring this creative boredom in my everyday life? Here are some examples:

• Sitting in the tension of tasks that feel hard without task switching.

• Lingering in the long pauses of transitions in tasks around the house

• Letting fantasies play out in my head without the need to act on them.

• Sitting on the couch or laying on the floor for long periods of time

• Staring at a tree or the grass or a flower for long gazes.

• Focusing on my breathing mid task.

• Holding objects and books around my house in my hands in gratitude.

• Deleting Instagram for an entire year. More on that later.

• Doing less in my business in order to yield more.

• Resting longer in fallow periods knowing they aren’t fallow.

I”m still chewing on this and I’m sure I”ll have more to say later as this journey continues this year.

I’d love to hear how you are exploring more creative boredom, what has it yielded for you? Where does it feel rewarding?

Thanks for being here!