Rilke wrote to a young poet:
". . . it is so important to be alone and attentive when you are sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than any loud and accidental point of time which occurs, as it were, from the outside."
One of the odd things about our time is that we have so many distractions that we never get actually bored and savor the feeling. Yet it is an essential gateway to the Self. There are strange moments when our future enters into us, and begins the process of embodiment. Our future self and our present self begin to relate to each other and merge. We have to be attuned to just ourselves and feeling into the new.
In the late 1970's I used to live in Santa Fe, New Mexico and teach meditation at Los Alamos National Laboratories and the staff there. Northern New Mexico has some of the most beautiful skies you will ever see, because the base altitude is over 7200 feet. You can see forever.
Driving between my home and Los Alamos was as beautiful as it gets, a good road winding through the hills and high desert and no traffic. Wide open emptiness. I had a jade green BMW 320i that I loved to drive, and one day I pulled into a gas station in the middle of that vast nowhere. There was nothing else for miles, not a store or shed.
As I pulled in, I saw a teenager attendant get up to greet me. He was totally alone there, and he looked as if he was drenched in loneliness. In 1979 there were no cell phones in everyday use, and Los Alamos was one of the centers of the internet but outside of universities, no one had heard of it. There probably was not even radio reception in this spot. So there was absolutely nothing for this kid to do, no distractions. He had to just be with himself. For hours and hours a day.
From his facial expression and the energy radiating off of him I could see that he was in the kind of desperation that only a teenager can bear. It was a plea of I WANT TO LIVE PLEASE GOD GET ME OUT OF HERE based in utter boredom and loneliness.
I must have seemed to him as if I dropped down from a spaceship. He looked at me with utter gratitude, sort of like a dog in the pound.
I was way early for my classes in Los Alamos, so I stayed there to talk to the kid.
He thought he was miserable, and stuck there at his uncle's gas station, but at the same time he was absolutely attuned to his POWER of yearning, he was daydreaming and visualizing what he wanted to do in life, and getting SO READY to go live. So the kid thought he was unhappy but actually he was in an extremely creative state, his energy field was big and vibrant and eager.
I was 30 and had been teaching meditation for 10 years, and had developed an approach to individualizing meditation for each person, that I was very happy with. I had been working on this for years, how to listen to each person and then help them develop a daily practice that fits their life and what they love. This for me was the answer to my prayer, that I had been yearning for since I was 18. When I began meditation, I was tutored by a circle of geniuses that helped me fine tune the practices so that I thrived in my physical body, emotional body, mental body, prana body, bliss body, and soul body. It was all about honoring your instrument. I loved this so much that my entire desire was to be trained so that I could offer this to other people. Now here I was, miraculously to me, living fully in the electricity of this desire fulfilled.
But a year before I began meditating, I was in a similar state to this teenager, actually way worse. I was so desperate that I said to the sky, I WILL DO ANYTHING. I WILL GO ANYWHERE. I WILL ENDURE ANYTHING. JUST GET ME OUT OF HERE AND INTO LIFE. It was a total, absolute commitment of the kind that probably only teenagers can make. So I resonated with this teenager.
One small thing you can do as a practice is to willingly "enter" little odd moments, transitional moments, when ordinarily you would look at your phone or computer or email or social media or messages.
Use the same impulse to browse, and instead of using any technology, browse in your sensations, in your electrical impulses of sensation, in your brain waves. Dare to be bored, restless, and seeking. This may take a few minutes, because our senses are so attuned to perceiving media. You may find you have to kind of grab your senses and reclaim them.
Media are called that because they are not immediate. The media place themselves as a substitute for your senses. They place themselves inbetween you and the world. And they are beautiful. But it can feel like an act of daring and aggression to take back your sense world.
You might formulate an intention such as,
"Just for the next hour, I am going to let my map of the world be only that which I see with my own eyes, smell with my nose, hear with my own ears, feel with my feet."
You also might cultivate an INTEREST in weird background sensations in the realm of boredom and strange restless feelings, and just for a certain period of time - 10 minutes or 20 minutes - tend to them.
Give it a chance. See if BOREDOM is a gateway for you.
For all of human history until the last hundred years, that is, for 99.9999% of human history, almost everyone had long, long periods of what we would call boredom. Long nights with no lights. Long winters with nothing to do. Long long long days in summer just harvesting wheat. Hours and hours and hours of just looking at nature. Everyone lived their entire life within 10 or 15 miles from where they were born. Almost no one ever traveled. Once a year someone who had seen a CITY would travel through and the whole town would come to hear stories.
So it's not like doing nothing, just breathing, and walking around in nature with no big plan, just looking at light and space, just listening to the sound of the wind, is going to harm you.
Here is a longer quote from Rilke
" seems to me that all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we feel as paralysis because we can no longer experience our banished feelings. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us, because we feel momentarily abandoned by what we've believed and grown accustomed to; because we can't keep standing as the ground shifts under our feet. That is why the sadness passes over like a wave. The new presence inside us, that which has come to us, has entered our heart, has found its way to its innermost chamber, and is no longer even there—it is already in our blood. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be persuaded that nothing happened, and yet something has changed inside us, as a house changes when a guest comes into it. We cannot say who has entered, we may never know, but there are many indications that the future enters us in just this way, to transform itself within us long before it happens. That is why it is so important to be alone and attentive when you are sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than any loud and accidental point of time which occurs, as it were, from the outside."
Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1902
Letters to a Young Poet
