An emptiness of mind

One of the faculty members came to our office the other day to complain to my colleagues and me about his boredom.  There was nothing happening on campus, he said, that satisfied his interest. Not only that, he noted there was nothing inside the entire community of Naryn sufficiently interesting to break his boredom funk.

I thought about this for awhile. Perhaps I am greatly lacking in empathy, but I have almost no empathetic impulse for those claiming boredom. One of the problems with the bored is they think that boredom is a condition that springs from a deficiency of the outside world when, in fact, I am convinced that boredom is almost exclusively a difficulty that comes from within.

In defense of my bored colleague, after considering the idea of boredom in a solitary moment over a cup of tea, I realized that what we call boredom might actually be something else. Perhaps boredom is much more complicated.  It is an emptiness of mind.

An emptiness of mind is when you don't feel any engagement with the world as it presents itself to you.  Perhaps it is because you are depressed, which makes it difficult to connect fully with the world.  Maybe the cause is you don't have the capacity to understand or relate to the stimuli you are encountering.  That's why nuclear physics seems boring to me:  I am wholly incapable of understanding it.  It is an emptiness of mind that comes from non-comprehension.

In my contemplation of boredom, I realized that I have also been suffering from an emptiness of mind lately.  I didn't attach the term boredom to my disengagement from things that usually keep me occupied, nor did I call it boredom those many times I've spent just staring out my window.  But an emptiness of mind it is, and it has caused me these past couple weeks to be like a car stuck in neutral, moving nowhere at all.

There is a reason, however, that some spiritual traditions encourage an emptiness of mind.  When our minds are empty, we can despair, or we can raise a call against what we perceive is a boring world that's overtaken us. Or we can take this emptiness of mind as an incredible opportunity to re-focus and contemplate again what we want to take from the world and, even more importantly, what we wish to contribute to this cosmic accident where we happen to find ourselves.  Boredom cannot flourish in a climate where what one gives takes precedence and a mind cannot remain empty when its focus is outside itself.

And I also learned last night there is one other sure-fire cure for an emptiness of mind, even if you aren't able to successfully fill your mind yourself.  With a group of awesome people, we made pizza together and engaged in pleasant conversation while eating. What a useful rule of thumb: make pizza with friends and your emptiness of mind will disappear. Even better: make a hundred pizzas and share them with the world.

The world is in a bad state and evil forces surround us. Hope seems distant. Boredom and an emptiness of mind can so easily overwhelm us.  Time to re-focus, knead the dough, and get to the business of baking and, in embracing this process, we then take the actions needed to bring us engagement with the universe and those with whom we share it.  Let us act to transform our emptiness of mind by contributing to the fullness of each other's lives, because each moment is too precious for us to do anything else.

One cure for an emptiness of mind