Bored

The one thing no one admits they want

Shift

My friend of 35 years—also my executive assistant—retired on Friday, and what I keep coming back to isn’t just the length of time, rare as that is, but the kind of partner she’s been, the original version of the role before it was optimized into something more transactional. She was doing things before you even knew you needed them, clearing paths you didn’t see, holding together more than anyone ever formally acknowledged, and doing it with a quiet precision that made everything else feel easier than it was.

She’s moving on now, not to something new in the way we usually frame it, but into caregiving, fully and intentionally, as a grandmother to two boys and as someone who shows up for ailing friends and siblings without hesitation. As she was walking out, she said it lightly, almost as an aside, that she guessed she was destined for caregiving, and the way she said it made it sound both inevitable and completely accepted, which is exactly why it stayed with me.

It clarified something I hadn’t quite said out loud yet, not about her, but about the phase of life we’re in, where responsibilities don’t go away so much as they change shape and then multiply, becoming more personal, more consequential, and less optional, and where you don’t step out of being needed so much as you become more embedded in it.

Nothing

Somewhere in that realization, a thought surfaced that didn’t match the tone of everything else and felt almost inappropriate in its simplicity, which is that I want to be bored, even though no one really says that anymore. We say we’re stressed, or that we need a break, or that we want something different, talking about rest as if it should still be productive, still interesting, still worth the effort it takes to plan it.

There was a time when boredom was the thing to avoid, when we chased movement and exposure and anything that felt like momentum, and even COVID, for all its constraint, only reinforced the idea that getting back to life meant filling the calendar again as quickly as possible. What I find myself wanting now isn’t more or even different, but the absence of being needed, even briefly, not forever but long enough to step out of constant response mode and remember what it feels like to choose where my attention goes.

It’s not a vacation, because that comes with logistics and decisions dressed up as rest, and it’s not the absence of responsibility, because that’s neither realistic nor the point; it’s something quieter and harder to access, a stretch of time where nothing is required, nothing is shifting, and nothing new is arriving that needs to be handled. Corporate hell, of course, doesn’t cooperate, and even in the middle of everything else a surprising amount of energy still gets spent on things like where we are all going to sit, negotiating with groups who aren’t using what they have but aren’t about to give it up either, as if stacks of boxes and untouched desks aren’t quietly telling the truth.

Bitches, what I’m describing isn’t a lack of options but a lack of demand, and at this stage of life it doesn’t happen on its own, which means you have to choose it, and choosing it turns out to be harder than anything we used to chase.

Here’s to boredom. Happy Mother’s Day.