Ask most people what boredom is and you get a version of the same answer: it is what happens when there is nothing to do.
The line comes from a book about writing, of all things. In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard writes: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
More than 200 hours of hanging out, talking, and doing ordinary things together before someone starts to look less like a regular friend and more like a close one.
For a while in my late twenties and early thirties I half-believed the years ahead would mostly get heavier, with body and mood quietly sliding together and I am not alone in that forecast.
Ask almost anyone what they want more of and the answer comes back fast: time. Time off, time away, time without the calendar dictating the shape of the day.
Eight weeks is what stopped me in my tracks. Not years of monastic discipline, just two months of regular practice — and the scans showed a measurable increase in gray-matter concentration in a brain region tied to learning and memory.
Two and a half minutes. That is how long, on average, a person used to stay on a single screen before flicking to something else, back when researchers first started measuring it.
Imagine standing in a fast-moving river. The water doesn't care that you have planted your feet.
The version of me from ten years ago would not have believed how much I now want a quiet, ordinary life.
In the 19th century, a French philosopher called Paul Janet proposed that time appears to accelerate by the proportion of life already lived.
The Greeks had two words for time. Chronos is the clock, minutes ticking evenly past.
I was waiting for a friend at a café the other afternoon — one of those places in Ho Chi Minh city where the stools spill out onto the pavement and the motorbikes go past close enough to feel.
This piece is a personal reflection on attention and habits, not a clinical or psychological assessment.
When I think about my first year in Vietnam, I think about a morning on a small balcony, a cup of black coffee, the heat rising before the city was properly awake.
The afternoon at the second café is where it tends to happen, if it happens at all.
The wallet in my back pocket is darker than it was when I made it. The leather has gone soft at the corners.
