Bored.
That’s something I haven’t been in a great long while. The labored breathing sometimes associated with the lack of stimulated activity has not graced my body in, if I were to wager a guess, six years. Six years ago I was 23. Twenty-three and living on Hawai’i. It was in Hawai’i where I discovered new pillars of my being.
It took one massively painful breakup, an endless smathering of fog that blanketed cityscapes like icing on cake, and of course, relocating to an island in the South Pacific. Sure, the latter is hardly a cause for internal alarms to blare but having spent the first 16 years of my life marooned on one- I’d like to argue its prickly squeeze on my senses. The point is, for me, it took a hammerfall of courting a relationship with MYSELF, while simmering in a pot we can aptly name, un-comfort zone, to (at the risk of sounding cliche) find myself.
For me, finding myself was akin to discovering a long lost box of assorted legos in the attic, with a flash light. It was one thing to find myself, it was another to embark on an exploration to create/build myself. You can attempt to build yourself in the dark as effectively as you could reconstruct an exact replica of the Eiffel tower with said lost legos, in said dark attic. That being said, I loved playing and building things with legos as a kid- I spent endless hours pouring over schematics and testing what worked and what won’t including many things beyond what was described in the instructions.
I was never bored.
Stepping out of my comfort zone- embracing EVERYTHING and living in the moment, that…that has propelled me beyond all expectations. I feel both, the tension and the kinetic energy of a drawn-and-released rubber band. Am I suggesting you move to Hawai’i and start building lego armies? No. But if it’s out of your comfort zone, hey, it might spur some beastly ambition back into the light. Every day is a chance to build. And it’s okay to reduce what you were doing into rubble. Often times that’s where improvement occurs. At the very least, it won’t be boring.