If you’ve got enough time on your hands, you can always chase some sheep. Photo: Kim Treasure.
Dear reader, I have a confession to make.
I am dreadfully, ruinously boring.
I learnt this when I was about 11.
Every school holidays we were whisked away from our small coastal town to a magical land called Cowra, where our grandparents have a farm.
It was a time before the internet, a time when free-to-air TV was mostly ads, soapies and the news. Granny and Grandfather had a single VHS tape of the Robin Hood movie wherein Robin is a cartoon fox.
There were also three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves for entertainment.
On the farm we’d get to take part in endlessly exciting activities, like rounding up sheep, shearing sheep, crutching sheep, and trying to teach the working dogs the kinds of tricks we saw town dogs do at home.
Sometimes if we were really lucky we got to do extra exciting and risk-free activities like trying to jump the postie bike, jumping off very high things, burning off (I was not good at this), or shooting sparrows with a BB gun.
I couldn’t bring myself to do the last one but my cousins said I was good luck. I’ve been a repentant vegetarian for the past decade.
Poking wasps’ nests with sticks before running and the annual Christmas water fights were about as exciting as life got.
This might sound idyllic to you but, firstly, I was a bookish, nerdy little kid so I wasn’t very good at any of these activities and, secondly, without a phone in your pocket there’s a lot of doing nothing in between.
It was on one of these occasions I made the mistake of telling Granny I was bored.
She didn’t put me to work – instead she excoriated my soul with the observation that “only boring people are bored”.
Brutal Granny.
Unfortunately this new piece of self-knowledge didn’t help me banish my boredom.
I was not suddenly inspired to invent calculus or even bake a cake.
The nice thing about being bored when you’re part of a big family though is that eventually it goes away, often to be replaced by a more interesting feeling like annoyance, frustration, or deep-seated rage.
Twenty years later, I’m no closer to finding the solution for boredom.
I’ve invested a good decade or so investigating whether scrolling endlessly on social media or googling the answer to every fleeting thought that crosses my mind will fix it, but alas.
There’s only so long you can scroll and search before you realise that most people are either trying to sell you something or have thoughts that are unoriginal, unintelligent, or untrue.
This isn’t to say that the people themselves are any of those things, just that it’s unlikely you’ll find the best of humanity’s ideas in the one to five sentences fired off into the ether at 3 pm.
That realisation has brought me back round to books and (mildly) reckless stupidity.
Most books have input from at least two people – an author and an editor – usually more.
They also take more than five minutes to write. As a result, most books (even the bad ones) are still significantly better than most social media feeds.
If you needed any justification to read your favourite genre of trash, there you have it.
Hubby and I have also recently begun skateboarding with a small group of similarly middle-aged friends.
To be fair, husband dearest skates because he did it when he was a kid and I mostly watch and provide feedback that is both useful and wanted, but still.
I don’t think either of these things have made me any less boring, but they have made me considerably less bored, which is all I wanted in the first place.
