If you attach your
happiness with material things like a house, food, travel or wealth…etc, or
with something semi-material like the number of friends, then be sure that
boredom will chase you. However, people who are more attentive to the spiritual
and psychological life don’t feel bored even if their material situation is
less than others. We see the mystic or worshipper stays many years in the temple
and doesn’t feel bored.
They who live life
focusing on moral aspects like thinking, analyzing, innovating, feelings and
emotions are less bored than who live on the visual and material aspects only,
because matter offers nothing by itself. If you cleaned a room and arranged it
well what will take place in it that worth all the effort? The human is the
most important and his/her spirit is more important than his/her body.
For example, the Western
material civilization is plagued by boredom, addictions and even suicide, which
you won’t find in underdeveloped countries in the same high rate. The reason is
that they are soaked with material things. They have money, servants, and
freedoms which they thought that its absence was the cause of their
unhappiness. So, all relations and connections have been broken in the name of
freedom, and a person can do whatever s/he wants and sleeps with whoever s/he
wants and expresses whatever s/he wants, and yet boredom keeps following them.
Generally speaking,
boredom is bliss, because it urges man to seek and do the best. The normal materialist
social situation once looked attractive because of its ambiguity, but after
they reached it and unraveled its mystery they found nothing real and true in
it. However, who deals with the constant, i.e. God, will never reach a dead
end, because man can’t encircle God, thus will never be bored because s/he
lives the permanent sweetness and pleasure of faith.
The first step to cure
boredom is to stop seeking material objects and turn to mental and emotional
realms, thus breaking the boundaries between man and himself, by attempting to
speak, think and concern himself with these new interests until the old
interests grow weaker. Gradually, one will arrive to a degree in which she can
be in one place for a long time and yet doesn’t feel bored. It’s true that the
place is one, but the ideas are constantly renewed.
We see that people who
are uninterested in the moral and spiritual aspects in an ongoing search for new
things, changing clothes, fashions and places, because they are concerned
mainly with matter.
On the contrary, if
there were a group of philosophers, you’ll find them going around the whole
world without changing their place. Meanwhile, you see people going to tourists
attractions but see nothing important unless it’s especially noticeable, and
you’ll find them getting bored of it and won't not come again. But who can
taste mental and intellectual pleasures might stop at one landmark reflecting
upon it and studying it for years, as one philosopher said that he's willing to
spend the rest of his life in the back of his garden. Because he thinks and
meditates and observes the roses and insects, while one glance from a shallow
person to this garden will make him feel bored and won’t look at it again.
Change is a spiritual motive, but the mind translates this
emotional need falsely, connecting the feeling of boredom with a material
object and then goes looking for that thing and tires himself for it, and might
not be able to reach it.
"Those whose efforts have been wasted in this
life while they thought that they were doing things correctly!" (the Quran).
Man’s soul is looking
for tranquility, and that’s what the believer in God feels even if they don’t
do many things. The believer can control their acts unlike the materialist
person who feels pushed to do things and work. The believer doesn’t do a thing
unless they feel it’s suitable, because they are basically passive, due to
their tranquility and satisfaction with what God has destined, and they only do
what they can. The tranquil self is the opposite of the anxious self which is
always looking for something, whenever it goes somewhere it feels bored and
wants to go somewhere else. While the self that has reached faith has found
calmness and homeostasis.
Physical pains can be
forgotten, unlike psychological pains. Even moments of joy are forgotten
because joy is man’s default state. When people talk about calamities they
address them in a material perspective as in lack of food or electricity, but
if you look carefully into the real cause that tires them you’ll find it to be
a psychological one. If they were filled with love and confidence many things
will feel a lot easier and they’ll be more capable of being patient.
People insist that
matter is everything, so when they meet you they ask about the house, job,
money as if your happiness only lies in material things. That is a false test
of happiness. Because there can be people living in the midst of comfort and
wealth but they feel miserable because of boredom, losing someone they love, or
feeling psychologically restrained. We see people who belong to the wealthiest
class in the world but matter added nothing to them, and people who are
materially less fortunate and yet they live more happily.
Every person is
actually two persons, the first aspires to reach the second, and the more you
get close to the second the more happy you are, the more you move away from it
the more lost you become, because it owns the first. The first is terrestrial
and the other is celestial.
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