Most people are conditioned to experience boredom as a deeply unpleasant experience. I recall a program that Bill Moyers did a few years ago on the mind/body duality, in which he joined in a sitting meditation. It might have been zazen or something like it. He couldn't stand it. He found that he just couldn't remain in stillness, not even for a few minutes. Instead he became agitated and had to stand up and leave the room. The way he described it made me think it was a kind of panic attack. Of course he was deeply curious about this powerful reaction to nothing at all. I'm sure he's been thinking about it ever since. And so he should.
If you reflexively avoid boredom, you are not able to access the enormous richness of experience in just being. In my view, that's a terrible loss. Read any of Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" books for children and you will get a taste of that experience of just being, as it was even a generation or two ago: people not always rushing about, multitasking and never really experiencing their real environment, but instead sitting and watching all the minute and lovely activities of the world. It's a child's way of looking at the world, and Ransome perfectly captures the wealth and innocence of it.
Or consider Hermann Hesse's "Siddhartha", in which the main character, when asked what makes it possible for him to succeed where others have so often failed, answers, "I can think. I can fast. I can wait."
The thing is, boredom is not real. It's an illusion, a passing symptom of addicive withdrawl, Beyond it lies a world of real experience, exquisite in its quiet subtlety. "Pay attention" says the Zen master, who is roundly ignored because the advice he gives isn't mysterious enough, doesn't require any shiny technology.
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