one of my 365’s while I was in KonaI woke up today after my ritual sunday afternoon nap and just found myself bored. I found it ironic since I’ve been writing a bit about boredom lately. Justin posted a comment on one of the last posts saying boredom is an inability to rest. My boredom today was rooted in that very thing, I felt like I needed to be doing something, but had no desire to do what I needed to do. But there was an internal struggle because I felt like I needed to be doing something.
My wife and I had an awesome conversation tonight about literature. My wife is an english major and she’s reading a book right now and I asked her how it was. She dived into an answer that I didn’t expect, she started talking about the narrative voice and how its written differently. These are things I would never even consider.
I asked what she thought about some authors that we both know Francine Rivers and Donald Miller, she talked about them as writers and it moved us into a discussion about poetry. She showed me a paper she wrote in college which dissected a Emily Dickinson poem. She handed me the poem first and told me that I had to read it. I glanced over the poem and thought to myself well that’s nice. And then I read her paper, and a whole new world opened up because she pointed out things that I didn’t even know to look for.
It made me marvel a bit at the intention of a few words. That the author took the time to say so much with so little. Intentional. Being intentional takes time, it takes rest, it takes processing. Maybe it even takes being bored from time to time. I want to get back to a place where I live intentionally and take things in and processing them. I want to walk through life not run.
JIM baker
