I often quote British intellectual Sir Aldous Huxley's famous
observation, ' Every individual is eventually a bore.' It's not a particular
person who's boring. We all tend to lose our novelty with the passage of time
and become a bore to other person. I could be boring to many. Many are boring
to me. Hardly anyone in this world retains his/her charm till the end and
that's an art we are all so bad at. Now the question is: Why almost every
person eventually becomes a bore? Boredom is directly related to lack of
novelty and monotony. Human beings look for novelty in a person and
relationships. When we don't get that, we get bored. We also get bored with a
person or object due to over familiarity. The Bard of Avon aptly said, '
Familiarity breeds contempt.' It indeed does in the long run.
When you constantly bump into the same person, you later realise that
there's nothing left. There's no excitement any more and no newness. Why does
love often taper off after marriage and a husband and wife become boring to
each other? The reason is monotonous familiarity. Lucknow-born great British
crooner Sir Cliff Richards could never marry despite his scores of love
affairs. The reason was the fear of monotony creeping into the relationship, if
graduated into marriage. It's very interesting to observe that elephant, a
primarily herd-animal, tends to change its group after every six months. It
remains with elephants but the set of elephants changes after every six
months!! In Arabic, we often say, 'Inzilam wa majlis tabdeeliyaat '
(Keep changing your company). Same people, same ideas and same thoughts provide
nothing new and offer no new insights after a certain period of time. One
begins to get a kind of de ja vu.
In Burmese Buddhist religious order of Mahayan sect, every monk is sent
to a new monastery after a period of nine months and this goes on for first
twenty four years of monkhood, called Bonija in Burmese. The
purpose is to expose the monk to new religious orders and philosophies
continuously so that he doesn't find a particular idea boring because of
continuity as well as monotony. The best way to evade boredom or a boring
person is to be in a state of constant flux.
Most of us spend our entire lives with a set group of friends and people
and even their life partners remain static. While it shows their commitment in
a socially accepted manner, it also underlines mankind's inherent fear of
embracing the new and novel. It's a kind of an unaltered attitude, which is not
desirable for one's intellectual and qualitative development. The problem with
us is that we know, we are getting bored with a situation/set pattern or a
person, but we deny that because we feel that it's rude on our part to leave
and go away. It's not rude.
Only by calculated distancing (Austrian
psychologist Adler's term) from a person or a seemingly ineluctable state, can
we re-explore and tide over the boredom. The water of a river gets stagnated
when it doesn't flow. The same analogy is applicable to human relations and
eventual boredom. We must flow with the tide and if a change is imperative, we
all must accept it wholeheartedly. After that, nothing will bore us and we'll
be able to bear things, people and circumstances with equanimity, if not with
gleeful abundance.
---Sumit Paul
