To Boredom

Curiosity gets all the credit.

In speeches for Pulitzers and Nobel Prizes, in scholarship award letters, in memoirs and biographies, they say things like, “She was always a curious child,” and “He never stopped asking questions!” and “My curiosity grew and grew until…”

But you and I know that you are the unsung hero. Without you, curiosity doesn’t even exist. You are the soil it grows it, the air it breathes, the sunlight and the water. You are the incubator they never see.

Face it. You’re not sexy or interesting in any way. You are, in a word, boring. You are the mid-Saturday afternoon in someone’s 15th summer. A kid too old to go to summer camp or anything with “Teen” in the title and too young to do anything else. And the Internet is down. And all the books have been red and it’s raining outside. All the friends are on vacation and the dog is too old to play fetch. You are as slow as time can be. It’s 3:07. A cricket. A car passes. The fan looks lopsided. It’s 3:08.

You’re a special kind of torture. So passive. So quiet. So very intimate. We don’t invite you in or seek you out. And yet there you are, at the dinner party we were looking forward to. At the zoo. The funeral. My god, you are ruthless.

We think new ideas start with “Why does…” and “What if…” and “I wonder what…” but that’s wrong. They begin when you walk in, when you flick ideas away from us, clearing the air. Not this, you say, not this. Good Lord, definitely not this--until we have dug so deep into the bottom of our soul, dug up the one unfinished, raw, unformed thought that finally feels solid. It was weight enough.

“You can thank me later,” you want to say. But you never get the credit.