field of wheat

There’s no time to be bored about anything

field of wheat

One of the first things I’m prone to correct with my kids is their use of these words: “I’m boooooooored.” By this, I don’t mean that I seek out ways to entertain them. Instead, I tend to challenge them. I mean, really? Bored? How on earth can any of us be truly bored when there is so much worth exploring? This is something G.K. Chesterton understood well. He didn’t life simply as a good thing, but as an adventure—the supreme adventure, even. He wrote,

Falling in love has been often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident. In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something of a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and transfigure and torture us. It does break our hearts with an unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far as we have certainly something to do with the matter; in so far as we are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some sense jump into it; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even judge—in all this falling in love is not truly romantic, is not truly adventurous at all. In this degree the supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. (Heretics 191)

The problem, of course, is we don’t all get this right away. Like my kids don’t always understand this, I didn’t understand it until I was much older than they are now. My issue was that I believed a lie. But God has given us so much to explore, to be curious about, to seek to understand. There are books to read, paths to explore, recipes to invent, new skills to learn… Our great issue is never  really boredom. We don’t have the time to be bored. There is far too much adventuring to do.

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