By Fadi Abu Deeb

When we see boredom as grace, our reality will differ utterly.

Boredom is not a mere situation of frustration and feeling down with no obvious reason, or something appears because of routine, but it is in fact an indispensable phenomenon that enables us to preserve ourselves and keep it immune from being vanished in “the outside”, in that exhausting “externality”.

Without boredom, we would hardly turn back to ourselves, and would have lost in sheer movement and in being busy with externalities.

Boredom summons us to internality once again.  It calls us to settle down after a long time of sojourning, and to inspect what we are and what we have become.

Boredom is a call from the realm of phenomena to the realm of real existence, and a constant stimulator to invent enchantment that we often lose.

When I get bored, I remember that I live away from enchantment, on the shores of ordinariness or perhaps in the depth of its ocean!

Boredom is nothing but the negative side of enchantment.  In other words, it is being enchanted of my disenchantment: my awakening to the fact that I have lost vitality, or that I need a change, a reconsideration, or maybe a reevaluation and an understanding of what I am doing.

Looking for the essential meaning of my deeds and their purpose does not happen effectively unless the soul is pervaded by boredom.  Thus, boredom is nothing but a divine call, embedded into the phenomenon of action.  The purpose of this call is to constantly awake us to the transience of phenomena over against the immortality of the essences (essential meanings of life).  In other words, it is a compulsive breaking of the world of ideals into the world of action, to re-examine the corruption of our view, the loss of our track, motivations and goals, even our whole existence.

Boredom, then, is a proof that we are beings dominated by the absolute, who are not satiated but through it; that we are beings with a longing toward enchantment.

And what is that enchantment but an entry into the realm of feeling the finality of our orientation, and our harmony with all that is natural, humane, good and beautiful?

What is that enchantment if it was not an instant feeling of a universal power of compassion, both familiar and extraordinary at the same time?

Boredom is not a presence of the absurd in our lives, despite the necessary absurd shadows that it casts before our eyes.

Without this fear of absurdity and nothingness we would have never moved or loved.

All these fearful phenomena are nothing but the other side of our constant endeavor toward enchantment.

Is not enchantment, then, a total immersion in ultimate love?