Bored

You are bored.

In Aleppo, Syria, someone wants to live. Missiles shower over his home from war planes.

A man far away in a second city of a second country just came out of brain surgery. He has been administered drugs so he does not fall asleep. This is crucial to monitor his evolution. He can’t move. Many tubes and needles all over his body prevent it. After twenty-four hours of complete awareness and total immobility, he feels bored and tells his family who accompanies him, expectant, anxious, tired and nervous, beside his hospital bed.

A widowed mother with three very young boys (three, four and five years old) can’t find a job. She storms into a Board of Directors meeting with her sons and asks the twenty men there how she will feed her children.

A teenager in a refugee camp awaits a government letter for days and days and weeks and months and hours and minutes and seconds. In this letter, part of his future is written. His destiny written, not by an imaginative artist, but a government employee who is now bored in his office.

A thirty-two year old man comes home from work. He can’t breathe. Something is wrong. He can’t tell. He feebly tells his wife. She calls an ambulance. Nobody knows yet that he will be dead in a week.

Two men in military uniform present themselves to a woman who works as a cleaning maid. They communicate to her that her son, in obligatory military service, died of a rifle gunshot, cause unknown.

Taking risks prevents you from boredom. “Live dangerously.”

In order to improve, training, breaking all habits, incorporating new ones, requires painstaking repetition, routine, consistency, and seemingly obsessive commitment.