Feeling bored can be a sign that you are just simply not in-tune with your self or with your surrounding. It's also the condition when you losing your focus on your personal goal. Because when you are really into your goal, you are pratically immersed in it. Just like a gamer who can spent hours and hours on quest of conquering and playing the game from one mission to another. In a way, feeling bored also can mean that we are at that moment is out of our own game. 

Perhaps it's the sense of mission or goal that is being vagued. It can be you simply out of your breath and get tired. Human's feeling is a very complex, usually it never be one or two factors involve to invoke certain feeling.

That's why in time of boredom, you need to pause. Just stop from whatever activity or schedule and deadlines that you are busy with. It's time to give yourself a break. Because what you need is to reoriented and refocus on what drive you from the beginning. Something that slipped out of your mind and heart somehow when we are so get used with doing routines and repetitive chores and activities. 

When you pause. Try to find a comfortable space and position on your own. A quiet environment where you are able to listen to inner heart without any distraction - and yes, it involves turn your mobil to silent mode if you are not expceting any emergency call-. Because the next 5 or 10 minutes that you are going to spend for your own will change the way you deal with your live, in this context - the boredom.

Try to get in touch with your feeling by feeling your breath. It's the essence of life. Breathing is a nature's way of bring in and let go. Not withhold. Just work with the flow. This is also the very basic element of overcoming boredom. Because most often you feel bored because your mind take you somewhere else but at your present moment. And when that happened, you are losing your connection with whatever activity you are doing. When you lose connection, the sense of meaning will automatically fade away. And you feel like you are doing nothing. Hence, the boredom feeling came into your senses.

Feeling bored is not a bad thing. On the contrary, it means you are alive! Because then you can feel something. Take a look at it as a signal that asking for your attention. Stop for a while. See within, what you really need. Where are you going to go. What you really need and what you really want to accomplish. [] 

Do we really have to pursuit happiness?

 It was John Locke (1632-1704) whose coined the phrase 'pursuit of happiness' in his book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he was a major English philosopher whose political writings in particular helped pave the way for the French and American revolutions. Later on, Thomas Jefferson took the phrase and incoorporated it into his famous statement of a peoples' inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in the America's Declaration of Independence.

What most people don't know, however, is that Locke's concept of happiness was majorly influenced by Greek philosophers, Aristotle and Epicurus in particular. Thus far from simply equating "happiness" with pleasure, properties or the satisfaction of desire, Locke distinguishes between imaginary happiness and true happiness.

And since happiness in Aristotle concept came from the word "eudaimonia" - what later on translated in many ways become "holy spirit" (daimon = spirit). Then we can understand that the notion of happiness is actually came from within, it never depend or cause by external factors. Because life naturally will always change. The cycle of life is like the rotation of the earth towards the sun that created day and night phenomena. So does with life. Sometimes, night fall and everything seemed dark, vague, even hopeless and scary. But when the morning come, you started to see things clearly. Your fear fade away, the light of the sun makes plants grow and animals alive. All of the liveliness we feel in life is like "the day time of our life". And it is absurd to always want the sun shines in the sky while creatures also need to sleep, and we need some degree of coolness. Just away from the heat of life for a while.

When we contemplate on that. Then we realize that depending our happiness in this ever changing life is kind of tragic, because along with the come and go, we feel evertime the pain and sadness. While there are other way to deal with it. To accept that the night will come, to embrace the pain and loneliness as a part of life. Even a seemingly tragic event happen to us can be a good remedy for our soul. And with that, we don't have to pursue the happiness. By being okay with what is rather than always want to chase what we want. []

Amsterdam in the beginning of fall season, 2 October 2021