Only Boring People Are Bored.

We live in a culture today that revolves around entertainment. A person can't go five minutes without some form of it or another. And there is certainly a correlation between the nations shrinking attention span and the dissipating quality in entertainment.

Boredom is considered a disease anymore, people claim it can lead to heart attacks and other early deaths. With all these 'restless this' and 'restless that' syndromes, we're expected to find something for all appendages to do as well.

I can recall a time in high school when my friends and I were never bored. We had the ability to be active and do crazy things that at the time seemed completely reasonable. Sometimes it was as immature as drawing on each other while we slept, other times we would engage in random intellectual conversation. We bought 50$ worth of tacos one night. Looking back, this was most likely done strictly for the story of it. A buddy of mine set the cruise on his car to fifteen miles an hour, and with his hand on the steering wheel opened his door and ran along side for as long as he could. We almost died (not really...).

I bring this up because a large chunk of the difficulty a soldier faces while overseas, believe it or not, is simply boredom. Free time leads to thinking, and too much thinking in such a situation can lead to fright, nervousness, even slight panic.

Lucky for me, I'm a firm believer in powerful imaginations and excess creativity. I find it hard to think that I could be in a position where I wouldn't be able to find something to keep my mind busy, happy, and most of all off topic of the place I'm at.

Of course, this is the future. A person can carry half a lifetime's music in their pocket, hundreds of books under their arm and thousands of hours of movies in a laptop case. The average soldier takes with him roughly this much entertainment for a year long deployment. I myself have with me two dozen books, both of the electronic and hard copy types, weeks worth of music, about three dozen different television shows and movies, along with multiple video games and four large notebooks. Coupled with the number of people in my platoon who are undoubtedly carrying a similar number of things, I'm confident in my ability to stave off boredom for a while.

Not two days before deployment, the conversation in my platoon was dominated by everything that was being purchased last minute. Playstation Portables (PSP), iPod Touches, laptop computers. Young kids spending all the money they haven't made yet. When we weren't talking about these acquisitions, we were listening to our NCO's tell us not to go spend all our earnings, that we need to save up. The advice that they never listened to the first time they went over to "the sandbox" and wished they had.

Entertaining oneself is an important ability to have in the military, who's motto silently is 'Hurry up and Wait!'. It is just how it sounds, we get shuffled to and fro, always rushing to get one place or another, only to get there and, well, wait.

Keep this in mind the next time you're sitting around, searching the channels desperately for a new program to occupy your mind. Maybe write a letter to a soldier instead, or perhaps bake me some cookies. I think I'd like that...

Keep on keeping on.