Random Tangent
Ninety degrees of randomness
Being Bored, Processing Your Life
Following on from my post on ‘How to be Alone’, I have two articles two share. One that I remembered from earlier this year and one that I read today.
In ‘Why I Returned my iPad’ Paul Bregman talks about the importance of boredom and unproductive time in his life:
Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.
My best ideas come to me when I am unproductive. When I am running but not listening to my iPod. When I am sitting, doing nothing, waiting for someone. When I am lying in bed as my mind wanders before falling to sleep. These "wasted" moments, moments not filled with anything in particular, are vital.
They are the moments in which we, often unconsciously, organize our minds, make sense of our lives, and connect the dots. They’re the moments in which we talk to ourselves. And listen.
While in ‘How Do You Process Your Life?’ Tara Sophia Mohr talks about the need for downtime during which she reflects on and process what’s been going on in her life:
I need reflective processing time desperately, I’ve learned. Not because I’ll stop functioning without it. On the contrary, I look more “normal” to others when I don’t have it.
[…]
But to be the woman I want to be – emotionally generous, not cranky or erratic or jaded; to be spacious and open and deep, to have a presence that feels to myself and others to be grounded and alert and graceful; to be someone who brings more sanity into this world instead of contributing to the craziness, then I need downtime. To deal with colleagues and professional partners in a rational and calm way, to manage the challenges of my work effectively, to show up creative and focused everyday, I need to process what comes into the ecosystem of me.
I agree wholeheartedly with both Bregman and Mohr.
How To Be Alone
Here’s an awesome poem by Tanya Davis:
I love being alone.
In fact, I need to be alone a lot. That’s how I recharge. That’s how I de-stress. That’s when I truly relax.
A lot of things that people seem to like doing with others, I like doing on my own. Such as watching TV or movies, going to the cinema, eating lunch, cooking, and shopping.
This is not to say that I don’t enjoy socializing or doing all those activities with others. I do. I love to hang out and do stuff with Nadia, my family, my close friends, and all of my colleagues at work. I enjoy those social interactions very much and they, too, recharge me (though in a different way).
Afterwards, however, I need to be alone again. If only for a little while. At work, for example, I make it a point to eat lunch away from my desk, in the break out area, with my earphones on (usually listening to a podcast). There are people around me, of course, but I’m in a little world of my own.
I need to be very alone particularly after hanging out with lots of people in a highly social situation – like at a party or conference. In fact, I need to go hide under a rock for a little while after attending events like those!
Being alone or on my own doesn’t mean everything around me has to be peaceful and quiet or that I have to be lonely. I sometimes like being alone in the middle of a really crowded place. To me, being alone means having my thoughts to myself, or reducing my sensory inputs, or simply letting my brain idle (like, for example, while commuting to and from work every day).
Why do I like being alone so much?
I don’t know. That’s just the way I’m wired or have come to be configured. I enjoy my state of aloneness. It makes my brain happy. I haven’t bothered analysing why. Some day I might.
I do know that I’m not depressed on antisocial, though. So it’s not because of that. And I’m not a loner, either. I have plenty of friends and acquaintances who I love to hang out with and who, in turn, enjoy hanging out with me. I make it a point to say this because, in my experience (which I have subsequently generalized a little), many extroverted people tend to jump to erroneous conclusions – something must be wrong with him, then! – when they find out how much I like being on my own.
I do think that my wanting to be on my own a lot might have to do with the way, or the speed at which, I process things. I’m not the best at thinking on my feet, for example. I like to take my time. I like to plan things slowly. I like seeing the big picture. That’s just a guess, though, and I’m sure it’s only part of the story.
Anyway, I don’t have a point or conclusion to make. This is not some big revelation or something I’ve been dying to tell the world about myself. I just watched that video, enjoyed it very much, and wanted to put my rambling thoughts on the matter out there.
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