Boredom – Diluism

One of my friend had put a MUMPS (Not disease, it is a database as well as programming language) line of code in his status message. As most were not familiar with this programming language so questions were raised asking what does this means. There were several funny guesses, leg pulling comments and what not. Fun reached at its peak and then everybody wanted to know the answer. Although the friend of mine who asked the question knew the answer very well but he expected somebody from his friend group to answer this. I executed this code in my MUMPS environment to find that the response is nothing but ‘bored’. 

This made me think what is boredom.

Our body is like a class room which has 5 students. You are the class teacher. You can start teaching only after controlling these kids and making them sit and listen to you. If one student is not listening then your other students are getting distracted, hence the class is getting disturbed. These 5 students are your senses. Due to improper teaching method we continue teaching without focusing on, bringing students’ attention. This makes us put extreme efforts to achieve little. After sometime, we get used to these ever distracted kids and enjoy their distraction and forget our duty. Then a time comes when the teacher as well as students are tired. Neither you are in a state to instruct them nor they are in a state to absorb anything. This state is called as boredom.

When our senses stop giving us any signal which can trigger any thought, we call that state are boredom. We see things but do not like what we see. We hear but that does not excite us. We do not realize the feeling of touch, we can not smell anything good and tongue is dry and tasteless. Then we try to find something that can excite us. We smell deep but do not find anything. We try playing some music but that does not help, we go out to have tea but it does not change the taste as well, roam around to feel the cool breeze but of no use and then browse through internet to see anything exciting but don’t find any.

What is the reason? The same sense which gave us excitement in other times are of no use. What is the cause? The cause is within. Teacher itself does not know what to do. Then what can you expect from the students. Then we think, let me learn something new. Find a topic, you search related materials, read them, ask question to one who knows it, listen to him/her, take a cup of coffee and smell it and then taste it while thinking about that topic, The warm coffee cup makes you feel good and you are no longer bored.

I think something similar was done by my friend here to overcome his boredom. He was bored. He wrote a line of code to write ‘Bored’ by translating ASCII values to characters. He asked the question to others? Others discussed this and finally the result was found after 39 conversations. He was no longer bored then.

So, Boredom is always within. It is never the place, people or the ambience. Find it and kill it in constructive you. You will learn something.

Namaste!!!

– Stray Dog