Sunday 7 February 2010

#38: The Value Of Nothingness.

My secondary school RE teacher once said something that had an unexpectedly profound effect on my life when I was younger. He also had a nack for steering any particular discussion of the week towards that of pornography, but thats neither here nor there.

Anyways, he once told us that, "Only boring people get bored."

I took that to heart, since then I've been absolutely determined to never be bored. Whether thats made me less boring to others or not is questionable at best, but the main thing is that in my own head, there's never an idle moment. The flip-side is that after years of constant self-stimu...*ahem*... self-MENTAL-stimulation is I now find it extremely hard to switch off.

Taipei does nothing to relieve this effect. I noted 6months after arriving in TP that it was amazing that every weekend - there's always something to do, people to see, somewhere to go. That is as true now, a year and a half later, as it was then. Crazy. This is Taipei, not even Tokyo matched this level of activity.

Which so leads me to my Sunday afternoons with The Marshmallow. Sometimes I'll go out hiking or go-karting, but on the days when I have nothing. We'll just hang out in the apartment, or goto the Starbucks down the road, and we'll do very little. We'll read a book, play a some DS, muck around with the laptop, watch some bewildering Chinese singing contests on TV. Yup, very little.

That damn RE teacher made it so that I always felt like I had to find something to do, something to think about. The Marshmallow reminds me to chill out, that its ok to slow down.

For that, I'm grateful.

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