...what does being boring actually mean?

Apart from being a song by the Pet Shop Boys, of course.

I was bored a few weekends ago, and it's the kind of boredom I wouldn't wish on anyone: mind-numbing, eat-your-own-arm kind of boredom, as I heard a man repeatedly telling us how many contracts he'd been offered for how much money over the past few years. It was a mistaken attempt to get us interested in entrepreneurship, sadly undermined by his off-hand remark that of course, he'd put far more work into a presentation at a conference for which he was being paid a thousand Euros than for a teaching seminar at an adult education class where he was only getting paid two hundred. It's a shame it was our education class he was talking about...

Anyway, it made me think that for him, no doubt the conference and the thousand Euros represented excitement, success, something he had achieved. But do all those things have to be synonymous? How about failure? How about everyday life, things that happen by accident, things that ordinary people like to do? How about being boring? 

In Berlin,  it's easy to feel you are on a merry-go-round of events, ideas, debates and tasks that you can never get off. Lucky, unlucky to be part of it? Lucky, of course. But what's at the centre of that merry-go-round? Is it a centrifugal or a centripetal force, does it push us away from the centre or draw us in? Or do we just get so dizzy, we fall off?

Kleinmachnow

Here at the edge of the city, the weather has changed. Suddenly we've been waking up to blue skies and heavy frosts like snow glittering on roofs and hedges. The first evening of winter, I took the cat out across crisp, crunching leaves that to my astonishment were turning white with frost already at seven o'clock. I stared up at the stars which were clear and bright in the already dark sky, while the cat delicately and disgustedly lifted her paws high to avoid as much of the cold ground as possible and then raced home as if being chased by White Walkers (That was pretty much the last evening walk we did.)

There's so much to write about - English tea-shops, strange translation workshops, a visit to the Berlin Authorities and German bagpipers in a cemetery - but this morning, struggling with the stress of going out to work, dealing with home admin, and wanting to write as well, I didn't even try. Instead, I opened the kitchen window wide and leant out into the freezing air to breathe in the frost. No-one else was up. It was silent, except for birds twittering and rustling through the otherwise still trees. A woodpecker was darting up the beech, which still retains a few golden leaves, and I watched it for a while. Its feathers were puffed up and it seemed driven, perhaps by the cold, to run up as many branches of as many trees as possible, never settling. By contrast, I was doing nothing at all, not to any outward eye. I wondered if this is what I mean by saying it is good to be boring. 

Recently, an article in Zitty (the more left-wing of Berlin's two regular listings magazines) decided to tackle the subject of FOMO head-on. The writer, a young journalist, took on the challenge of doing something every day and night, not saying no to any event that might be offered to her. The joke, of course, is obvious to any Berliner. Even with events filling her entire day and half the night (or the other way around), she would never be able to do even 1 per cent of all those things she might be aFraid she was Missing Out on. 

But does this really make life more exciting? Or, to put it another way, does the quantity of "things happening" equate to a life less ordinary? Or, in fact, a life that is better?

The honest answer is, in some ways, yes it does. The sheer volume of Things Happening, people making things happen, is in some ways infectious and amazing. The fact that people care enough to make things happen is liberating. The fact that people are humble and excited enough to learn new stuff, do new stuff, is joyful. 

But there's another side to it as well. And I've thought about this a lot, because some people probably think I'm just being smug and irritating saying that it's good to be boring. So I need to have my answer ready. It's not good if you're stuck in a small town where even learning a foreign language makes you a crime suspect! I imagine them saying. Or there's no cinema or theatre! Or art! Or dance classes! Or...anything! 

That's true. I know those small towns, I was that suspect (well, in my head anyway). But I never said it was good to be bored (that's a whole other blog).  Being boring is not the same as being bored. 

Being boring can mean a lot of things. Obviously, it can mean that you make other people want to bite their own arms off, which is not a good thing. But it can also mean simply that you turn away from Things Happening, in the usual sense of "Things Happening That People Are Doing".  Or "Noisy Things". Or "New Things". Other things are happening, too. They're just not always new things. Or loud things. Or, most importantly, human things.

Alone at a window, with no other humans nearby or awake, not even the sound of other humans to remind me of what I am, I am enthralled by existence. Birds fly here every day. For all I know, their routines are so regular that they fly to the exact same tree at the exact same time every day. The sun comes up over there, beyond that house, every day, not at the same time, but pretty much in the same way, although today is particularly beautiful. The wild boar are out every night, in pretty much the same patch (you can tell). Are their lives boring? I would hazard a guess that they're not. Not just because the fight for existence doesn't leave time to think about boredom, although that's probably true as well. Animals in zoos do get bored. The cat gets bored, now and again, though I'm sure she doesn't think of herself as boring.

The thing is, I'm not an animal or a bird or a tree. I can't stop measuring time or live entirely in the moment, or not for long. I can't really imagine what it's like to be that way, to be entirely and totally connected to the earth around you and your own body upon that earth, because I'm a human. But I can imagine it a little bit. I know what it is like, just a little bit, to be somewhere, in a time and place, where the present totally and entirely demands your attention, where you begin to be present, all the time. It wasn't boring. It was something quite different from either boring or exciting. And it's no coincidence that this was a place, an island, where there were more animals and birds than people and not enough electricity to run a coffee machine.  

There's a tension here I can't ignore; I love new things, new people, new places, new ideas in particular. But I also love everyday life. The older I get, the less I want to consume culture in an attempt to gain excitement, or to look for a way out of boredom, and the more I'm interested in those other things. Things I haven't been looking for. Things that happen on the edge of a city, rather than in the centre. Things that happen outdoors: falling conkers, buzzards wheeling overhead, the turn of the season. Things that are, in a way, boring. 

Winter's coming...