Boredom

Be Careful What You Wish For

For nine months, I fantasized about this. Specifically, I fantasized about nothing …just the glorious, cathedral-quiet experience of sitting still without anyone asking me to explain long division or mediate a dispute over whose pencil case is whose. I had a whole vision: my sofa, sunlight, maybe a book. What I did not account for was that by day four, I would be standing in my kitchen at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, staring into the middle distance, genuinely unsure what people do with afternoons. I reorganized the contents of the bathroom sink by height. I watched a seventeen-minute YouTube video about the ingenuity of beavers and their engineering skills. I texted my wife "hey" and then didn't respond when she texted back, because by then I'd moved on to alphabetizing the toiletries I had just reorganized by height.

The truly humbling part is that I know I need this. My body needs this. My nervous system, which spent the better part of a school year running on yerba mate and sheer obligation, is apparently so unfamiliar with rest that it's interpreting relaxation as a threat. I keep catching myself mentally drafting lesson plans, which is the psychological equivalent of a golden retriever fetching a ball that wasn't thrown. Summer is eight weeks long. I have reorganized the bathroom sink twice. We're going to be fine.