The Weight of a Pause

I spent this morning staring at the rain against my window, waiting for a kettle to boil. It felt like the longest five minutes of my life. I found myself tapping my foot, checking my phone, and rearranging the spoons in the drawer just to have something to do. We are so terrified of the empty spaces in our day. We treat stillness like a mistake that needs to be corrected immediately. But watching the water run down the glass, I started to wonder if we are losing the ability to simply exist without a purpose. There is a specific kind of honesty in doing absolutely nothing. It is in those unscripted, heavy moments of waiting that we finally stop performing for the world and start being ourselves. We are so busy trying to fill the silence that we forget how much the silence has to tell us. What would happen if we just let the boredom settle in instead of running from it?

Ryszard Wierzbicki has captured this exact feeling in his photograph titled Boredom. It is a beautiful reminder that there is a quiet dignity in just sitting with yourself. Does this image make you want to slow down, or does it make you restless?