Most people spend at least a third of their lives being bored; and the strange part of it is that their so-called amusements bore them more than work.
Put five or six people together on a business task and each will take considerable interest in it. They have to; their jobs depend upon it. But gather a similar group of persons together at home and each is bored to extinction by the pet subjects of the others.
And why? Because they have not mastered the art of acquiring new interests. They have not learned to enjoy the variety of entertainments this world offers.
Yet it can be done. And it doesn’t require any college degree or particular talent, only an elementary understanding of one’s own capabilities. What you do, the attitude you take, determines your feeling. If you listen to your husband talk politics or your wife rave about clothes because you “have to,” trying to escape mentally the while and paying as little attention as possible, you experience terrible boredom. On the other hand, if you dive into the topic mentally, take a spontaneous interest in it, try to master it, compete with Fred’s knowledge of politics or Lil’s information about dress and fashions, if you want more of the thing that once bored you, you'll find yourself enjoying it tremendously. That is’ your truly divine capacity for making life pleasant. You cannot control what other people are interested in, but you can control and enlarge your own interests to include theirs, and you must do it if you hope to enjoy life.
I knew a young lady who was badly bored by a wom an’s club. Her friends attended regularly and she hadn’ the backbone to be different. So this supposed recreation became her worst punishment. She sat through lectures week after week, dumb and miserable. Then other members talked her into organizing a drama class.
Caught in the net of hard work she was compelled to interest herself in it to escape. Suddenly, one day, she discovered that she didn’t want to escape; the club work fascinated her. She read books on the drama. She read plays from Shakespeare to Eugene O'Neill. A vast, new field of esthetic interest invited her exploration and she plunged into it eagerly. Lectures at the club took on new meaning. Other subjects came alive for her also poetry, civic reform, current events. Today she has a living, growing mind instead of a dull brain saturated with boredom.
In many instances your attitude toward a given activity can be changed by a simple act of will. You need only decide to do the thing you dislike and automatically you find yourself enjoying it. Many men are utterly bored by wifely insistence that they look into shop windows. They gaze obediently with unseeing eyes while sputtering indignantly in the privacy of their own minds. But martyrdom is unnecessary. I have persuaded many a husband to look into show windows of his own volition. The results are astonishing. Behind plate glass lie new worlds full of interest and amusement. No artistic insight is needed to reveal these treasures, only a mental opening of the eyes. What women have always seen becomes visible to men the instant they choose to look.
Most men mistakenly assume that you look into show windows to find something to buy. Women know better. They enjoy window-shopping for its own sake. Store windows, when you look into them with pleasureseeking eyes, are strange places full of mental adventure. They contain first clues to dozens of treasure hunts which, if you follow them, lead to as many different varieties of treasure.
A man who was particularly bored with art glared impatiently at a window display of Chinese paintings. “Senseless things,” he snorted. “All out of proportion!” His wife laughingly informed him that the Chinese idea of perspective is to draw objects as they look from above. Like an airplane view, she said. That caught his interest — he is an aviation enthusiast. He began studying Chinese art and now he is an amateur specialist in a subject which once irritated him.
Experienced window adventurers maintain that the perfect hunting ground for rare interests is the antique ‘store, commonly called a “junk shop.” Wide silver bracelets worn by Arab girls for protection rather than ornament, heavy metal collars once welded about the necks of Saxon serfs, crystal balls which develop strange visions when one gazes fixedly into their mystic depths, gold ankle chains with real locks which formerly encircled the slender limbs of some sultan’s favorite. All these offer fascinating points of departure for mental journeys into far fields.
Glass has its own delightful story to tell — the delicate blue-green Peruvian product, glass colored red by an admixture of gold, the spun glass of Venetian invention, and the unbreakable eyeglasses of modern America, all stand ready, in show windows, to lead one from commonplace boredom to rare entertainment. The color themes of fashion-shop window displays are a never-fail ing source of mental enrichment — a window in which the clothes displayed carry out the colors of an Audubon print, for instance, showing how a whole scheme of interior decoration is often taken from a single picture or hanging.
A like method of acquiring new pleasures is deliberately to substitute a distasteful activity for one you al ready enjoy. Suppose, for example, that you are willing to get up at 6 o'clock in the morning and drabble around the golf course with a fellow addict, but you cannot endure the thought of helping your wife dig a trench for sweet-pea planting or set out a rare azalea. You abhor gardening and always have — it is your idea of the devil’s most boresome invention. Still there is hope tor you — from your wife's point of view. Try this: Make a heroic resolve to give up golf for a few weeks and get your fun and exercise out of tilling the soil.
Once you open your previously closed emotion centers to raising of flowers, the results will astonish you. Pursuit of rare plants and blossoms becomes a never-ending exploration. There are beautiful shrubs and dwarf trees you can buy at any good nursery, such as Chinese wisteria, Spanish broom, or Japanese cut-leafed maple. But there are others—syntheris reniformis, for example, a small plant with shining leaves and spikes of bright blue flowers—for which you have to pester collectors, or raise from seed procured after months of persistent effort. Sometimes you see a picture of some rare flower and search years for it in vain. Then you spot the seed in an obscure list, send for it, experiment, and eventually real ize the truly Napoleonic triumph of producing under perfect control in your own garden a flower that garden lovers will travel thousands of miles to see.
You make a pool, plant water lilies, photograph them from above, Chinese-painting fashion, with sparkling drops of dew still on the petals, and win a prize for the best flower picture of the year, a recent accomplishment of one of my neighbors. That leads to new chains of interests — water plants, amateur photography, color camera studies, even drawing and painting, thereby disclosing a talent you never knew was yours until garden enthusiasm stirred your creative desire.
It is really pathetic how arbitrarily we stodgy humans close our mental entrances against the unexplored joys of life. Cut off a well-developed amusement interest, take on an activity you have unknowingly assumed is boresome, and, after you have tasted the flavor of your freshly discovered pleasure, draw up a private statement of your psychological bank balance. You will find that your sum total of emotional riches has greatly and permanently increased.
Sympathetic understanding of people we like can often be used to make others’ idiosyncrasies a source of enjoyment rather than a cause of annoyance. Most parents, no matter how loving, permit themselves to be nagged into bored irritation by children’s questions. “Why don’t you want me to talk about dead cats at the table, Mummie?” “How can a fly walk upside down on the ceiling?” Quite legitimate and intelligent queries from the youthful point of view. But parents are thinking about something else. They do not want to think about the subjects which interest youngsters.
Yet if you open your eyes to children, they introduce you to forgotten worlds of vital and stimulating mental activity. You will be surprised at the amount of fun you get out of it. You will be amazed how your feelings change. When the youngsters begin to ask questions, you will find yourself interested, alert, eager to supply answers, triumphant in the absorbed attention which they give you.
What's more, once you have decided to sympathize with your youngster’s mental interests and enjoy them, you will find yourself embarked on a strenuous career of adult education. “Who made God?” is an elementary query you must learn to answer before you can pass your first child-set examination. Some general answer may satisfy, but when your youngster asks you more specific questions, as, “How do they mine salt, Daddy?” or, “Can a snail smell?” you suddenly feel humble, inadequate. You have to say, “I don’t know, son. But we'll look it up in the reference book tonight.” Then you acquire a new interest, or revive an old one. You read a textbook or an encyclopedia and you experience again the thrill of learning. You have the curious-minded little ones to thank for that, and for the months or maybe years of reading on some absorbing subject which naturally follows.
There are times when you find yourself unable to tread a new path because you are standing on your own toes. The pleasure-producing desire you need to adopt may be repressed by some other dominant, compelling wish which resents competition.
A well-known businessman confessed to me that he hadn't read anything but newspapers for years. Books bored him. I told him he must switch his attention from business to other interests for the sake of mental health. Relieved of his underconscious feeling that he ought to concentrate day and night on business problems, he began to read — economics at first, then psychology, biography, and fiction. He has developed a dozen new interests as a result of his reading and has recovered a good share of his youthful animation he thought was lost.
A needless limitation from which many strong-minded people suffer is their unwillingness to listen to what others say. They may be attentive for politeness’ sake, but all the time they are bored to mental deafness. “I've always wanted to know things,” Mrs. Velma Kingsley told me, “but when I ask some expert to explain, I get so bored with his explanation that I can’t listen.” Mrs. Kingsley felt insulted when I told her that listening bores her because she wants to do all the talking herself. She had not realized this, of course. But actually she endures a lot of needless punishment and misses much valuable information because she is afraid, subconsciously, that opening her mind to other people’s ideas will inhibit her own.
This common fault is quite easy to cure. You need only realize that listening open-mindedly is the most intelligent form of asserting your own superiority. Get the feeling of being a critic, a judge, a scientist, a collector of new ideas, always interested in hearing what others have to contribute. Then you will enjoy listening more than talking — and open a broad, new entrance to your brain through which countless fascinating subjects for thought may enter.
A cause of boredom closely related to an anti-listening attitude is “machine shyness.” It is amazing how many men and women drive a motorcar, yet when anything goes wrong, they just take the car to a service station and kill time while it is being repaired. They “cannot understand,” and so are bored by mechanical principles which can be mastered by an intelligent boy of 14.
In my youth I devised a radio telephone which didn't work very well. I told a youngster about it the other day, and he rebuked me. “You didn’t use enough amplifying tubes,” he said, and went on to demonstrate my mistakes. That 15-year-old knew more about radio than electrical engineers knew when I was a boy. He had absorbed his knowledge from magazines and advertisements and taking old radios apart because he was interested in them. The same sources of fascinating modern information are open to every adult, plus many more comprehensive, scientific explanations of our everyday miracles.
We accept the results — by far the least entertaining aspect of science — unquestioningly, and leave the major amusement to children and technicians.
Yet suppose you decide to listen actively and curiously to the technicians. Your oil heater won’t work and the company expert comes to repair the thermostat. You'll find him a willing talker. Ask him to explain the principle of expanding and contracting metal, show you the mechanism of the clock which turns off your furnace at any hour you elect. He may talk too fast, use a lot of terms of which you do not know the meaning. Stop him. Ask him to talk your language. He'll love it. There never was a true mechanician who did not get a thrill out of explaining his work. The more questions, the more detail demanded, the more he enjoys his discourses.
Interest is like appetite. It feeds on itself. All you need is a taste of some intriguing mental food to whet your desire for a man-sized meal. Of course, it is often true that those who are accustomed to a given type of intellectual menu take small pains to dish it out in appetizing doses. Many wives serve their husbands with vast quantities of verbal fodder about house furnishing, color schemes, interior decorations, and the like, never once realizing that the men “can’t take it.” An extraordinary number of people are bored to tears by too much talk about remodelling houses, architectural styles, and the making of old shacks into arty Summer places.
When a friend offers to show his new cottage, the bored person seldom has strength of mind to refuse. And boredom progresses in geometric proportion to the amount of admiration which it seems necessary to express. Oddly, too, house hobbyists are not satisfied with mere approval; they want critical reactions and suggestions. They want to argue and discuss. But take a nibble of interest, now and then, and watch your appetite for this subject grow.
Here is an easy way to acquire interest in architecture: consider the human purposes which different types of houses served in the times and civilizations in which they were conceived. The Turkish mansion, for example, had lattices through which harem women could see men passing without being themselves seen, pools where beau ties might disport themselves without fear of intrusion of any man save their master, towers where Allah might be saluted and enemies seen afar off, and roof tops where heat-oppressed inmates might cool themselves in the breeze that rose with the setting sun.
Or consider the old New England house: the protruding second story a device from which to shoot Indians who assaulted the doors, its well beneath the kitchen floor served by a pump to insure against thirst when be sieged by savages, and its secret passages, as in the Salem house of the Seven Gables, to permit fugitives from the King’s justice to live comfortably in the attic yet escape easily when officers of the law appeared with search warrants.
The English baronial castle with its dungeons for pet prisoners, the false fronts of one-story hotels and banks in American pioneer towns, designed to impress Eastern dudes, and the Hollywood stage-spectacle houses with their searchlighted swimming pools and scores of ornate rooms furnished by a hired decorater but never used except for show, offer diverse pegs on which to hang your curiosity and your amused appreciation of times and peoples.
Once launched on this mental adventure you will give ever-increasing attention to houses beautiful and ugly and to the features which make them so. You will study wood versus plaster, Sheraton and Chippendale and modern originals, chromium furniture and glass, oriental rugs and electric stoves. And your reward will be worth the effort. Here again is a new world which is yours for the desiring, a world of beauty, of psychological interest, and of satisfaction out of which nothing but your own stubbornness can keep you.
Happiness is not a picture which can be painted with a few bold, sweeping strokes. It is, rather, a delicately wrought mosaic whose intricate pattern is composed of many small pleasures and interests. The people who get real joy out of living are those who continually manufacture little harmonious pleasure pieces of experience. Every boredom and dislike is the raw material of pleasure. The only manufacturing equipment you need is the ever-ready desire which is yours for the thinking.
I'd rather be happy than President or King. You “have” to live with other people, share their activities, and go through the motions of orthodox existence — you might as well enjoy it.
“Once you open your previously closed emotion centers to raising of flowers, the results will astonish you.”