On Boredom

Spending 36 hours with my mother last week forced me to think about retirement and lifestyles of the older American. My mother was trained as a nurse and worked until Daddy's medical practice was established. After my oldest brother was born, she didn't work outside the home again until after we three children were all gone from the house. Then she worked part-time for a couple of years as a secretary to help out her friend who owned a nursing home.

She spent much of her life as a housewife, and that lifestyle continues. The retirement home where she lives provides lots of activities: game night every Sunday (she plays a mean game of Scrabble and beat me two out of three on Thursday afternoon); a social hour two or three times a month; cooking classes; speakers; Bible studies; and on and on. And yet I look at the life she lives and deem it boring.

Mother is 93. She wakes up early, but doesn't really get up and get dressed until 9:00 or so. She goes to "dinner" at 11:30, then comes back to the apartment and takes a nap in the afternoon. She fixes a light supper for herself, then watches the news and goes to bed around 8:30. Once a week she walks 100 yards up the hill to visit her younger sister who has Parkinson's. A couple mornings a week, she might take a walk around the hospital across the street. In the summer she drives up to the mountain cottage, 80 miles away, for a week or so at a time. There she spends time reading or just sitting on the front porch.

And now that I write down everything she does, it sounds like a busy life. But living it with her for a day-and-a-half, all I could think was, "I don't want to live to my 90s. I don't want to live this way."

I have to confess that I do everything in my power to keep from being bored. On my trip last week, I took two programming books, my laptop, a crossword puzzle book, a Sudoku book, and a very long novel on my iPod. Oh, and seven CDs for the drive to North Carolina. I got most of the way through the Visual Basic for Access book, and finished two parts of the novel while driving. I listened to 10 minutes of one CD. I didn't even open the PHP book. God forbid that I ever spend a moment just sitting and thinking.

Today was beautiful in Tucson. I took the Gardener to breakfast to thank him for all the plant-watering and cat-feeding while I was gone, then we went and bought more pots and mulch and flowers and spent time working in the garden. When we were done, I would have loved to have just sat there, drinking in the gorgeous day. But instead I shooed him off because I have sewing and laundry and computer stuff to do.

Maybe there's a big difference between being bored and being contemplative. I need to clear things off my to-do list so I can spend more time being contemplative.

Oh yeah. I remember now. I need to learn to say "no"!