Boring

Lamenting about my organisation's restructuring and renaming process with a colleague, we both used the word boring. It reminded me that at home this weekend someone on the radio was using a different concept of boredom than we were used to....and we found it interesting enough to discuss with our Dutch and Australian visitors (which shows what lengths the wet weekend drove us to). I'd always thought of boring as lack of stimulus but on the radio it was being discussed as a concept where there was lots going on but most of it dissatisfying or frustrating...with an element of 'white noise' about it. Perhaps these two situations just have the same consequence. But we wondered if it was more of a reflection on today's society and particularly on overdosing on multi-media. TV, radio, the internet, music, SMS, phone can all be going strong...and instead of providing stimulation, the result - boredom?

For me the antidote to both sorts of boredom is a walk outdoors across the fields. We tried it with our visitors....set off in bright sunshine with dramatic black clouds hovering not far away in two directions. Wonderful flowers, trees, smells, birdsong and crops around us as we scurried along. Then, sure enough, we got very wet. For me, definitely not boring and a lot more stimulating than sitting around all day indoors. Not sure what the others thought though - we'd already identified the previous day that our appreciation of being outdoors can be of very different aspects.