There is such a thing as pandemic time. A time that goes heavily and slowly. A time when the days are mixed. A time when there is no significant difference between yesterday, today, and tomorrow. A time that we slow down. This kind of time can become a very tedious process for people who cannot distract themselves. Pascal has a quote that I love very much. He says, “The sole cause of people’s unhappiness is that they don’t know how to stay quietly in his room.” However, we all need to sit quietly at a table in a room to contemplate, read, write, draw, or dream from time to time. Only in those moments, our minds can go beyond the walls where they are stuck.

Boredom has become a very modern problem. Boredom stems from the idea that life has a lot of shapes worth chasing. We always think that we have to do something, that living is always being on the move. We want that scampering off from one entertainment to another, getting honey from every flower. Living life like a gluttonous of life, as a sequence of moments to consume, drives us to boredom. We are bored when we don’t do these things and when we are alone with ourselves for a long time. We think that stopping or slowing down is the loss section of life.

In fact, in this slowed epidemic time, boredom is extraordinarily important in terms of a person learning to listen to oneself, take care of oneself, talk to oneself. Boredom can feed your ability to imagine. Boredom can lead you as an external power to build something, somewhere. There should be things that you can work on in the house. But these should be the things you do with pleasure; if you have an enthusiasm for carpentry, then you should do it. If you have an enthusiasm for cooking, then you should do it. There might be a cook is waiting to be revealed within you; to go into the kitchen it might mean giving that cook a chance.