Monotony can be heavy, everything seems the same. It feels like you are wasting time, like you are not doing enough. It can feel as a torture and a failure at the same time. We had created so many distractions, most of which we don’t need. We live in the least bored and least capable to handle boredom age. We are hunters who don’t know how to hunt.
Long and heavy monotony. We feel prisoners while we are building the bars around ourselves. Diversity is not the prison, the prison is the constant craving for diversity.
The monotony of all days alike, the life passing in front of your eyes. Monotony like nothing you have ever experienced before, monotony for which you cannot blame yourself, you cannot change your habits, you cannot change monotony which has been imposed on you. A monotonous prison, a trap – the scary trap of you staying alone with your thoughts. A spiritual context uncalled for.
It is like the monotony of a drop falling in a bucket of water, the monotony of a sketch drawn during a monotonous meeting, the monotony of a train riding slowly through a grey landscape. It is painful mainly because you do not know when it will stop. No surprise, no variation, no escape. Nothing to wait for, except for the sameness of the past, current and next moments.
It is so unescapable that you only have two choices – embrace or despair.
Tibetans roll their prayer wheels …all…day…long. They just sit and watch and wait and roll Tibetan prayer wheels for hours on end, without expecting anything to happen. They just do it out of devotion, they find a sacred meaning in twisting the wheel, sending prayers to the sky via their sole consciousness. They immerse in the monotony of this activity, they manage to blur the world around them, they become part of the activity and are just present, in the privacy if their mind.
Maybe if you make peace with monotony, you make peace with yourself.
We have come to think that monotony is unnatural. We have gotten addicted to excitement and keep craving for it when it is not there. What if monotony IS our natural state, and the excitement is the exception to the pattern, only when and if necessary? In the past, people did not question monotony – grandma woke up at 5am, milked the cow, fed the farm, collected the eggs, made the bread, worked in the house and in the garden, went to sleep when it got dark. To repeat the same the day after, while still managing to experience the essential feelings of love, devotion, curiosity, pain.
Monotony, sameness and boredom allow you to see beyond, to look for more. To connect with what is there, available around you. To connect with what is natural. To connect with the Earth. When there is no artificial distraction – we connect with the seasons, with the day, with the night, with the rain, with the sun, with every simple miraculous thing we have been taking for granted.
Take a few more tiny doses of life here.
Some related content:
On how to recognize a soul
On showing up with no mission
On being nice
On fear
Poetry of Living 
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