Let me describe a setting and a situation, and then you reply from your most honest self whether this was you in the past, and whether a part of that is still you. By nature I have never really been the most social person in the room. I was always one of the alt-kids, one of the cool kids who seemed to be into stuff that the majority didn’t really get. So back in the days that was Nirvana, Radiohead, Blink 182 and the related cool stuff like the Tom Green Show, The X-Files, The Matrix 1 and everything in between.
In high school that was all okay and cool, in college it rolled well too, and then in ‘real-life’, ‘working-life’ it takes you a while to fit in-------trial and error, until you sort of find your groove. Then when you look back at some old photos you think like I gained some, and I lost some. Initially that’s where that thought sticks, but then after a while you realize that there’s more going on and you refine the thought into something like I gained some, I lost some and I returned to some.
When I was a young kid I always felt good about myself, and that’s most of the feeling that I returned to over the years. When I was a kid I preferred to spend time either by myself, or with a few friends. That’s it. I never was one for very large groups, even though I found my way with it later on. But that’s not really what I’m getting at here. At the heart of all this is that I genuinely enjoyed spending time by myself when I was young, and over the years society somehow instilled that feeling that this is not okay.
I enjoy my alone-time. I cherish my alone time. It’s one of the parts of the day that I always look forward to, and which truly gets me to recharge my batteries. It in no way means that I do not love my family and all the other people around me, but it just means that I’m a better version of myself if I can have a chunk of alone-time to retreat, regroup and then re-engage.
There is one thing though that most people think of, when they think of alone-time-----and that is boredom. I keep on returning to my 12-year old self as a bench-mark. When you were bored as a 12-year old, what did you do? Well, sometimes I was bored, but it was always for a short while, and I would always find something to do. And I believe the same applies to most people. It’s just that boredom has this bad rep, in that you are better off doing something ‘useful’ instead of being bored.
I will admit though that unmitigated boredom is bad, and even detrimental. If you truly don’t know what to do with your time, then you are better off in any job or any activity that helps you to pass the time. I think that this is the exception, but there’s this sort of reflex that gets you to never reach that point. By engaging in social media, you never fully reach that point of boredom-------and you never reap its benefits.
That’s where it gets interesting, and where I surprise myself every time. The alone-time, the boredom, the ‘doing-nothing’ always ends up helping you to solve the bigger questions and bigger challenges in your life. If you just take one day off, partially as alone-time, partially spending time with family, partially reading up on things that you normally don’t read up on, and partly being bored. At the end of all that you will always have gained a new perspective that you simply didn’t have before.
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