Bored? Stuck? Get Curious

I'm never bored. I can't see how anyone can be bored when we all have our own thoughts to entertain us. But if you happen to be bored, take a page out of Mary Engelbreit's calendar. September quotes Ellen Parr:

"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

I recommend curiosity to my clientele all the time, not as a cure for boredom but as a guidepost for navigating intense emotions of all kinds. The reason I do is because curiosity is neutral. It's hard to be sad about something that makes one curious. It's hard to be mad at an object of curiosity. Curiosity and feeling bad almost can't happen together.

I checked the trusty OED for the etymology of curiosity. Not surprisingly, its roots come from Old French meaning "to care". And this is why curiosity works as a spiritual discipline. Whenever we care about anything, we are not usually in knee-jerk reaction to it. Instead, we are focused, attentive and curious. When we are curious, we are paying attention to whatever we're curious about because we intend to learn something either about it or from it. In curiosity, there is little room for reaction.

Sometimes the best place to focus one's curiosity is on one's own self. Let's just say that lately your knee-jerk response to anything in your life not going as you planned is anger. This probably means that you're angry a lot of the time because life definitely has a way of not going the way we plan it.

Try an experiment with your reactive anger one day, even for one hour. Turn the bright light of curiosity on it, and learn from it. When you become curious about your anger, you become conscious of it. You can't help it, really. And because curiosity itself is a neutral, open energy, you stand a genuine chance of learning from whatever you're contemplating. And usually, if you will attend to what's in front of you, you will learn from it, and you are then able to let it go.

How does curiosity work with being stuck in my life, you may ask? It's simple, and it's work. Knowing you're stuck is a good sixty percent of the solution. So, you're stuck. Tell it to yourself, acknowledge where you are. Be stuck for three days. I mean it. Really stuck. Sit in the stuckness. Wallow in it. Be as stuck as you can be. What this practice does is loosen the stuckness -- really, it does. Why? Because you're no longer resisting being stuck, which makes it worse. Instead, you're just stuck.

On day four, let yourself become curious about the stuckness. Who's stuck? Where? Why? When did s/he get stuck? Be a reporter, a real reporter, and report to your wisest self on the State of Stuckness in your life. Stay curious about the stuckness. Not how to solve it, just the stuckness itself. Spend three days telling yourself everything you can about being stuck. Keep notes as though you were going write an op-ed piece about being stuck. Consider giving your personal stuckness a persona, a mask, an identity, a voice.

On day seven, sit in quiet with your stuck self and ask the stuckness politely and with curiosity what it needs in order to change. Be prepared to be surprised. The last time I walked through this process with someone, the answer was so simple that she walked around dazed for days.

Curiosity is a wonderful spiritual discipline, beloved. It can spring us instantly out of resistance and into the process of living once again. Thank God there's no cure.