Jack wrote this in April, 2005:
I saw it on one of the threads on this database. Someone was complaining how he/she was SOOOOO bored with one or another lottery. Reminded me a bit of the old saw from the `70s. Someone asked whether sex was dirty. “If you’re doing it right, it is!” came the answer.
The entire concept of boredom as it pertains to lotteries is a strange one. Almost as strange as boredom, all by itself. The idea that life, anything in life, could be boring. There just ought not be room to squeeze something of that sort into our lives, what with the limited time we have to spend in this reality before we’re whisked away into the ether to reflect on all the choices we made while we were here, plan for whichever choices we’re going to be faced with next time around.
No time at all, thinks I, to be bored, to try to put the mind in a place where it’s even capable of understanding such a concept. I’m not going to do it. Certainly not as it pertains to the whispers of the universe, the ballet of numbers dancing into our reality through the lottery systems.
But rather than digress and settle into some sort of monologue singing the rapture of the dance of numbers, I think I’d rather reflect a bit on why people might believe their lives are empty enough to allow them time for boredom (aside from the sickness of the soul that might allow them to view live as merely a search to fill the moments until death).
I believe it might be the fact that modern life, modern humanity has done everything possible to sever connection to what this reality is all about. We’ve chosen a place for this lifetime where every single organism (with precious few exceptions) has to feast on the carcass of something else, just to survive. Maybe that should tell us something about what we’re supposed to be doing here, beyond just surviving.
I’d offer the possibility that we’re suppose to be trying to transcend the savage environment we’ve placed ourselves into. Not by the lie of avoidance, of turning our eyes away from it in repugnance, as we’re prone to do. Not by disguising the meat or chicken on the plate before us in such a way as to allow us to avoid recognizing that it was a living, breathing animal a while ago, before it came to be there on the platter in front of us. Before it was chopped to pieces and put on a foam plastic tray covered with clear plastic so we can see it, not as a piece of something once alive, but as an object. A rock.
That piece of chicken on the plate was, just recently, a creature that lived several months inside a 2X2X2 cage…spent the entire span of existence there for the exclusive purpose of ending up on that platter looking appealing. The eggs for breakfast were laid by chickens in a similar environment, cages lined up 3 deep, three football fields long, their entire lives.
We have to eat something. We might as well eat the chicken on that plate. Our not eating it isn’t going to change things.
But our failing to recognize, to pause for a moment to consider the creature that piece of chicken used to be, to acknowledge before we put a fork into that egg, that somewhere there’s a 2x2x2 cage with a chicken inside living for no other reason than to drop an egg per day into a chute so we can eat it, so we can spend more time on this planet being bored, seems a dreadful possibility.
We look at life through windows, through cathode-ray tubes connected to cameras held by someone else, someone who might, or might not be living. We shut down our senses to shave away risk, pain, things that taste badly, things that smell objectionable.
And we somehow discover that life is boring.
I’m going to have to think some more about this. Meanwhile, give some thought to adding some adventure to your life if you think it’s boring.
Jack
So Far From Heaven 