Being bored is an unnatural state.
If the world were bored with itself,
without question
it would not now exist.
And a quick inspection
of any part of the natural world
shows how unbored the world is:
birds wake to song,
plants bloom shamelessly,
crickets will not be still,
planets hurry on their courses,
the sun and all stars of the cosmos
explode continuously
in excited splendor.

Well, you say,
the fact still remains
that I am bored.
Bored to death.
The universe may be fascinated
with itself,
but I am neither a sun,
a bird, nor a cricket.
For one thing,
I have an imagination and a memory,
a mind which can conceive
of a thousand things
I would rather be doing
than working at this repetitive job,
looking at the same old face
each morning in the mirror,
chit-chatting with the same people.
And, you say,
frankly it does no good to tell me
I shouldn't be bored,
as though I could shed my boredom
like an unwanted skin just by willing it.
Furthermore,
calling my boredom unnatural
will only make me
feel guilty about it . . .
and do nothing to rescue me from it.

Fair enough.
It does absolutely no good
to preach against boredom
as on some moral subject.
Yet surely is it accurate to say
that boredom is an unnatural state.
The very words "bored to death"
indicate that strongly.

No living thing can remain indifferent
to its own death.
The instinctive and natural action
is to contrive an escape,
to fly from what threatens its life.
And the bored-to-death
can think of nothing else
but escape
almost as if their lives
depended upon it.

In a certain very important sense
if you are bored,
your life does depend
upon escaping your boredom.
Biologically and psychologically,
boredom echoes in your body
and takes its toll in blunted responses
and dampened vital resources --
the alarm has already sounded:
Retirement is a sentence
of premature death
for millions in our society.

There is, in fact,
no real way to escape
from the "boring now."
To what can you escape?
To yesterday?
But yesterday is gone,
and the most vivid memory
cannot bring it back
as more than a pale ghost.
To tomorrow?
There is an old wisdom
about the uncertainty
of tomorrow's chickens.
Clearly, it is most unwise
to trade what now is
for what only may be.

On the other hand
it is not unnatural to yearn
for an improvement in your affairs,
for a shift to a better time.
Nor is it unprofitable to do so.
Milton, grown blind,
wrote poignantly of what might be
termed "fruitful waiting":

To wait fruitfully
is not to dream away the now,
to brood about its dismalness,
to protest its unacceptability,
all the hallmarks of being bored.
It is to cherish the now
as the delivery room
of all that will be.
And while one hopes for the best,
one wastes no time fretting
over what may be considerably
less than that.
One waits expectantly,
but not morbidly;
hopefully, but not oblivious
to what the present itself
has to offer.

The one-who-waits in this manner
does not merely wait;
he is alive to all
that the world is currently offering
for his eye and ear and nose.

"What are you looking at so eagerly?"
asks the bored-to-death.

 But the bored-to-death
has already seen smoke
coming from chimneys,
and spiders on walls,
and smelled lilacs,
and these are only three
in a long, long list of things
which will not be noticed or missed.
A bird on a limb?
A face in the crowd?
A rustle in the trees?
How boring!

No, there is no escape from the now
into a better time,
as the bored-to-death
sooner or later find out.
Happiness must be found now,
if it is to be found at all.
It is the now
which is the time of everything
real and exciting
and natural in the universe.
It is this moment,
properly seen and used,
which provides
the only escape from boredom
which is genuinely possible.