listless trickle

Today's been a bland, boring day. I was taught that being bored is a bad thing, and for the most part, it is, so I'm reluctant to use the word and to admit that I'm, well, bored. But I am, so I will.

It's just been one of those "is this all there is?" days, you know, days in which you get up early, go through the routine, commute, work, eat lunch, work a little more, call it a day, then head home so that you can rest up and do it all over again. And through it all, you're totally and irritatingly conscious of the fact that you're locked into a routine existence.

At the end of an "is this all there is?" day (like today) you reflect and slowly realize that life isn't always the torrential drama, or narrative, you'd hoped for. Sometimes it winds up feeling more like a listless trickle.

Today's boredom has been dramatically compounded by the fact that I work with apathetic students, day in, day out. Or maybe it's the fact that I work with apathetic students, day in, day out, that's producing the acute sense of boredom in me. Stinks either way.

It gets a little tiring starring into the same sea of disinterested faces everyday. I show up, eager to talk about something really important, like writing, and they, in turn, can hardly stay awake. Or they text. Or they just stare ahead, as if looking through me. They just don't give a damn, glazed eyes and all. They're just bored, no matter what you do. You could tapdance or blow fire, and they'd just stare. The problem is, they'd rather do anything than write, or even read for that matter. Strange, since this is college...

It's just hard to get through to these people. Don't get me wrong. They're cool kids and we share as many laughs as we can. But as students, they're just totally, unequivocally disinterested.

When you've staken your all on activities like writing and reading, and when you've set out to help others excel at them, and when the others you've set out to assist exhibit disinterestedness and boredom all the time, you can't help but become bored yourself.

Blunt materials dull a sharpened edge. I'm certainly losing my edge, working day in, day out, with something so quietly cancerous and corrosive as apathy.

While it is punctuated by fleeting moments of satisfaction, enjoyment, and enlightenment, teaching is, for the most part, a drag characterized by apathy, on the one hand, and beaucracy, on the other. At least in my field. Which is why I can easily see myself walking away from the profession, permanently. I'm a good, innovative teacher; but if the chance comes along to do something else, anything else, I'll happily take it and say goodbye to all of this.

George Orwell once said that by the time most men hit the age of 30, or thereabouts, they lose all sense of individual ambition. Evenutally, they forget the aspirations and dreams that motivated their youth; in other words, they give up on the idea of one day setting themselves apart from the mass of people in the world by "doing something great." Instead, most people, according to Orwell, slip into quiet, anoymous lives doing whatever they can to get by.

In his words, most people end up succombing to drudgery.

This may sound pessimistic and depressing but really I think it describes a very natural process in which a person gives up on ambition. You start out with ideals but experience eventually bleeds you of those ideals. I certainly feel like I've been bled a little; but at least wisdom always comes with wounds.

Right now, I think more and more about taking walks with Meg, or the next cup of coffee, or watching the leaves change, or last Sunday's sermon at Urban Grace, or planting the vegetable garden we've been wanting for so long, and less and less about my job and the ideals that used to motivate me. This trade off, strangely, is comforting and soothing. Letting go is the surest way to inner peace.

I used to imagine myself living to work. Now I see myself forgetting about ideals and working to live. There's a universe of difference between the two.