Surrending to Boredom

What do you think of when you picture a circus studio? Exhilaration? Do you imagine sweat and flight, flashy tricks, visible progress? What about boredom?

Boredom follows us like a shadow. Sure, circus performers step into the light and receive applause. But the visible moment is a flash distilled from years of invisible endurance. And the shadow cast by that flash: hundreds of climbs when no one is watching. Thousands of dropped balls. Days spent finding the edge of a contortionist's tolerability.  The crowd cheers at the peak of the trick, not the sweaty, bruise-and-scrape climb. 

Handstands, my chosen discipline, involve their own sweaty climb. Minutes at a time with my gaze fixed on the floor, my body straining to stay still, but wavering back and forth on the balance point like a guitar string. The drills can feel rote. The progress, invisible. But that kind of boredom is tolerable to me.

Because there’s something romantic about this lonesome grind. Like Batman’s training: finding intensity in solitude, and sharpening oneself to a point. At least that’s how I imagined what it meant to be a hero, when I was 8.  Batman had the willpower to stay up all night if that’s what it took. But you know what my 8-year old vision of a hero couldn’t, or wouldn’t withstand? Meetings. Meetings were for Bruce Wayne – to blow off. 

The kid equivalent of a meeting is the “sharing circle”. Everyone has their chance to talk, and this edict is enforced by some adult making me sit still, be quiet, listen. Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone. Some adult, taking by force the only thing I really owned—my attention (a scarce resource: I wasn’t diagnosed with ADHD until my early twenties). And for what? To hear fifteen people sit in a circle, say their names and list their favorite color? Brilliant minds have spent lifetimes wrestling with what it even means to perceive color. Why should I spend even 17 excruciating seconds hearing someone mumble “marigold”? 

So recently, as a coach at a kids’ camp, when I saw the 11-year old boys enacting their impatience, I got it. You could call it boys being boys (though I dislike that phrase), you could chalk it up to ADHD, or a lack of socialization since they were Covid kindergarteners. The result was the same: they couldn’t tolerate waiting their turn, wouldn’t surrender to the authority figures demanding their silence and stillness. 

But I think there’s more to it than just rebellion. I also recognized in those kids the same subtle panic-sense I still sometimes feel. I suspect all of us feel it. The reason we hide behind phone screens when we wait in line. The feeling that time is precious, slipping away, and we’re not getting to the “real” part fast enough.  Adults are better at masking it, but it’s always just beneath the surface. Our mortality.

We spend so much energy trying to outrun that panic. We fill every pause with productivity, distraction, or just noise and brightness to banish the boredom-shadow.  But life has a way of confronting us with our shadows. 

This year, I was confronted. I injured my wrists and my C5-C6 spine badly enough that I couldn’t train the way I was used to. I had to wait. And this kind of waiting was not like waiting for the bus, when I could check the schedule, set a timer and play chess on my phone until my journey continued. This was more like the feeling of when the bus that was supposed to come doesn’t arrive. These injuries left me in a state of waiting different from the reliable rhythms of handstand training. This waiting was uncertain. Intolerably boring.

Intolerable because effort didn’t guarantee progress. I felt out of control. I can grind: I endure repetition to master a trick, to push my limits. I can do the Batman thing. But injury-boredom confronted me with purposelessness. Waiting without guarantees forced me to accept limits. Days would pass with no change, or a sudden regression. Not only was the “when” unknown, but the “if.” Would I ever return to full strength? 

So I turned to books. Brilliant minds who spend lifetimes wrestling with ideas. In Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman argues that most of our frustration with time comes from the mistaken belief that we can control it. We make schedules, lists, we follow productivity hacks—all in the futile hope of squeezing more life out of our ~4000 weeks. Burkeman suggests not that we try to master time, but the opposite: that we surrender to the futility of trying to control it. 

This year, I had no choice but to surrender. I couldn’t measure my circus life in time spent on new tricks or new shapes. It was futile. Sitting in the studio, watching others practice, coaching kids who had no patience for waiting, listening to check-ins and names and favourite colours. It all felt, at first, like salt in the wound: time moving for others but not for me. 

But Burkeman explains that when one surrenders to what he calls “communal time” (the collective time of the group), offering a small personal sacrifice of one’s patience, attention, planning, etc, then what emerges is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, family dinner is only possible if each person gives up their other evening plans, puts their phones down and contributes in some way towards that dinner. And family dinner offers something that each person eating alone cannot attain.

Even lone hand balancers, so proud of their self-sufficiency, wearing their solitude like a badge of honour, find each other. It is better when we train together – even if that means I take some time out of my own schedule to meet. Other hand balancers really understood what I was going through when I had to stop training. And in turn, my pain and  frustration this year has helped me to pay attention to other people going through the same feelings. 

Years ago I read David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. He wrote that to pay attention in dullness is its own kind of love; to endure boredom without fleeing into distraction is to practice attention, and attention is the medium of love. That it takes courage to endure the slow, repetitive, mundarity of modern bureaucratic life, without surrendering to despair or numbness:

True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—[…]—with no one there to see or cheer. […] There’s no audience. No one to applaud. No one to see you. Do you understand?

Now, coming out the other side of my injuries, I see this a little more clearly. True heroism is the endurance of boredom without giving in to despair. Even the sharing circle, which once felt like torture to me, like a pointless waste of training time, looks different now. The content was never the point. The circle is a form of training. Training in attention, in waiting. It’s not about what is said. It’s about staying together long enough to hear it. We give each other a stage.

As for boredom itself, I think of it now as a kind of crucible. Surrendering to  boredom doesn’t mean giving up ambition, but in fact the opposite. It means accepting the conditions under which growth is possible. If I’m not ready to listen to the hum of the studio heater, to see the way dust drifts in a beam of light, or feel my own breath on my face, then I’m not ready to make progress in hand balancing.

At a certain point, hand balancing is not about strength but about listening. Listening so finely that you can sense the smallest weight shift. And that sensitivity doesn’t come from novelty or adrenaline, but from stillness, revisited so many times that I can notice how my breath moves my ribs, which part of my hand takes the weight, how my knuckles bend. 

Boredom isn’t a hurdle to be cleared on the way to circus. It is circus.