Boring Consistency

The eventful aspects of life aren't many compared to the flat lines, in terms of what's going on within a week to week basis.

Most of our existence unfolds in the unremarkable middle and we remember the peaks and valleys with crystalline clarity and these are outliers in an ocean of ordinary hours.

If we're lucky, the genuinely memorable moments could fill a few dozen days across an entire year, leaving the other 340-some to blur together in their sameness.

Part of me believes it comes with the territory of exploring the human experience in a grounded, embodied way, in that the nature of having a body means most of your time will be spent in its upkeep and basic functioning.

There are highs and lows, and then there's the vast middle ground where most of life actually happens.

A bit thanks to my curious nature, I'm not always bored with being alive, whether that's just trying to survive or dreaming of thriving in an uncertain world. Both can feel equally necessary on any given day however survival always comes first.

I think the misinterpretation I had is being alive equated with this electric feeling of constant aliveness, as in some perpetual state of engagement or meaning that pulses through each moment.

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Of course, outside of my mental/emotional bubble of inherited beliefs and preconceived ideas, there's probably enough room to get high, so to speak, on the simple fact of existence itself.

But this is for the most part inaccessible to me, at least the way I want, given the influence of a mind trained to seek stimulation and novelty, which is partly thanks to the years of digital conditioning that taught it to expect rewards on a variable schedule and to scroll past the ordinary in search of the extraordinary.

I think part of the reasons why mundane activities carry a lot of boring-ness, in the sense that they feel unstimulating or even deadening, is because the level of awareness it takes to do the activity is way lower than what the ordinary mind has been conditioned to expect.

An example here is gardening work, which I'm beginning to realize is a great way to anchor myself in the texture of real time.

In this domain, it's quite noticeable that things grow at their own pace and my attention has nowhere to escape to except the what's at hand, soil, roots, leaves, etc and the rhythm of the work itself.

I can't scroll when I do this type of work. It's just doesn't come across as something to even remotely consider.

But I can feel my hands remember what they're for and notice the mind slowly downshifting from its usual agitation into something closer to presence. The quiet consistency of being here, doing this work, now.

I wish I could just somehow retain this atmosphere beyond this kind of work and be much more comfortable having an empty yet present mind.


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