My boredom, your problem.

• Author: Puterbaugh, Dolores T.
• Position: PARTING THOUGHTS

BOREDOM, LIKE BEAUTY, means different things to different people. What bores us, and what takes our breath away, tells more about us, perhaps, than we generally may want known. When one person looks at an athlete--Lance Armstrong, for instance--and sees an idealized human form drawn in the hard-won efficiency of planes and angles, and another sees a repellently thin person, something internal to the viewer is revealed. Conversely, those who view runway models, certainly underweight by medical standards, as prototypes of ideal female beauty have a strange, nihilistic view of life and beauty if the benchmark must hover so close to the brink of starvation.

When museumgoers slouch before a canvas strewn with garish colors and collaged bits of photos of violence and despair and talk of its beauty and significance, I feel fairly safe assuming they either are twisted or insecurely groveling for approval from people whom they do not actually understand. On the other hand, when someone stands facing a mid-19th century French or English landscape, with all its academic formality and subtle references to works of the past, and expresses some insight into any of those factors--or simply its beauty as a work of art--my assessment is different. You are free, with this information, to make assessments of your own.

Perceptions of boredom, like those of beauty, tell more about us than whether we were blessed with the opportunity for a good education and grasped an optimistic, versus nihilistic, view of existence. Boredom speaks to a set of expectations, internal resources, and resourcefulness. Whether boredom allows us to segue, in some situations, irretrievably into despair is due to the interplay of character and innate abilities. Few are capable of being Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the gulag, or the world-class chef who kept children entertained with stories and descriptions of meals in a concentration camp. Most humans are capable of something above whining that they are "bored" when no one is entertaining them.

This happens with children, who should learn very, very quickly from their adults that boredom is the child's problem. Adult solutions for boredom in children ought to--most often--be either, "Great, I could use a hand with ..." or, "Well, then stop being a boring person." My husband said the latter to a visiting niece once; she looked stunned and wandered off to make the complaint to another, more sympathetic relative. That person found...