Picture this:
You’re listening to a song that you’ve heard for years, hundreds of times over. And yet, at one point, you hear something buried in the song—a vocal variation that you never picked up before, a chord change that you never paid enough attention to hear. And when you hear it, the whole song becomes new. Something that you thought you knew inside and out, forwards and backwards, actually manages to surprise you.
The honest truth is that all I have for you guys this week is a little belief: If you find yourself getting bored at any point in life, you’re simply just not paying attention.
That’s it. I can’t put it any clearer than that. You’re not paying attention if life is actually boring you, if there isn’t something around you that fascinates you or piques your interest in some way, you’re just not looking hard enough.
There is just too much in this world to allow for boredom—too much unique beauty and too much complexity in far too many aspects of life for any of us to even consider throwing in the towel and claiming that we’ve seen it all—that there’s nothing more for us to discover.
The worst paradox of that belief is that one of the large driving reasons behind it is the absolute quantum leap of technology that we’ve seen in the past 20 years. Massive strides in smartphone and PC tech along with the advent of social media as a behavioral compulsion for us as a species have made us dependent on it for our daily lives. Yes, we are more connected than ever, and I’ll never believe that social media and smartphones have made this generation any less sociable than a previous generation. However, I definitely believe that these rectangles of metal and glass can so entrap us with themselves that we can forget just how much beauty and uniqueness surrounds us at any given moment.
You might ask me for an example of this, for me to prove my point. Want me to prove my point? Look around you. Right now. Cast your gaze around until it settles on something that catches your eye. Think about why it caught your eye, why it demanded your attention. Consider its details, its intricacies. How did it get there? Who put it there? How long has it been there? Why is it there? Even these simple questions can develop some fantastic thoughts and musings about practically anything that you might see at any given moment in time.
And hey, look at that—at least you’re not bored anymore.
