As I lived in this experience at the most fundamental level, I felt such love and gratitude for the blessing of my mind and body, and the spiritual awareness that allowed me to observe their delightful dancing. Being orchestrated to perfection in their alignment, I smiled to myself knowing that in that moment there was no better place I could have been. In moments like these, I find it next to impossible to feel what it means to be bored.
With boredom being a judgmental reaction of the ego that is deprived of its addiction to excitement, this need to be consumed by something that titillates our attention takes so much away from our enjoyment of life. Representing a symptom of unconsciousness, boredom has the effect of impeding our engagement with the unfolding of life in a way that is both dysfunctional and stress inducing. Caught in the chasm that separates our reality from where we desire to be, we know not what it means to be free. Freedom in this context means being available to exercise autonomy or responsiveness to what is before us.
The love and gratitude that I felt upon perceiving the connection between my mind, body and spirit would have been absent had I given in to the temptation to be bored. By indulging this dissatisfaction, my heart would have been numbed to the presence of those blessings, and what I would have expressed emotionally would have reflected the void or lack that I perceived my circumstances to represent.
Never are we contented when we feel that we do not have enough of what we want or need. Studies have shown that people who don’t feel that they have enough time to do what they want are less happy and fulfilled than those people who believe that they have enough time in the day to do what matters to them. Time, in this respect, is very similar to money, in that levels of happiness are generally higher in members of the population who have the financial means to support their basic wants and needs.
When we feel like we don’t have enough time in the day, we do not feel in control of our own life. This leads us to suffer because in our mind we become dependent on something outside of ourselves to function effectively. Diminishing our confidence, we feel less competent, and what we produce as a result does not exhibit what we are truly capable of achieving. This, I experienced firsthand when I worked in the law, and like other lawyers, had my mode of working determined by the billable hours system. While that system has some practical utility in quantifying costs for work performed, its downside, amongst other things, is that it fractures attention in a way that tends to diminish the quality of the work performed. Some might argue that this is a necessary limitation in a busy field, and that claim has some merit, but undoubtedly it comes at a cost to the professionals who are doing the work. The degeneration of mental-health and well-being amongst lawyers in recent times is evidence of this, although the cause of these problems can’t solely be laid at the feet of the billable hours system.
What I can say from personal experience is that when I moved into academia from the law, I did feel myself becoming more creative and capable of producing what bestselling author Cal Newport describes as ‘deep work’. Removed of the constraints that too often roused the negative emotions of anxiety and self-doubt, I found myself much better able to engage with the work and those around me, which was important in establishing a sense of belonging. I have long surmised that one of the causes of depression which some lawyers experience, stems from the sense of isolation that the billable hours system, by its nature provokes. Having an artificial narrowing effect on focus towards the work to be completed on the matter that is right in front of them, the casualty of that hyper-attention or pseudo presence is the sense of connection that those lawyers feel to their colleagues and the purported systems of in-house support that surround them.
Dr. L. Christian Duperouzel 