{"id":8884,"date":"2026-05-15T21:38:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T21:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=8884"},"modified":"2026-05-15T21:38:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T21:38:07","slug":"opinion-you-should-sit-with-boredom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=8884","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | You Should Sit With Boredom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div id=\"\">\n<p class=\"css-8hvvyd\">Just tell me about how you understand patience. Growing your capacity to hold discomfort. Do you think that that as a general capacity as weakened? And I\u2019m thinking of something you wrote that I think about a lot. You wrote: \u201cRefraining is very much the method of becoming a dharmic person. &#8230; It\u2019s a practice of not immediately filling up space just because there\u2019s a gap.\u201d And we didn\u2019t use to have the ability to fill the space of every gap. &#8211; Yeah. &#8211; You were sitting in traffic and there wasn\u2019t a lot to do. You were in line at the supermarket and there was nothing really to look at. Just the daily necessity of sitting with boredom even has dissolved. And I think it changes us. It\u2019s so true. And not for the better, I would say. Less in touch with the richness of the world. Sometimes with students, very often these days, I really encourage them to go to the grocery store, offline; ride on the subway, offline. Be there fully for what\u2019s happening because you\u2019re not engrossed in a movie or a podcast or anything. Let\u2019s not get crazy here. &#8211; And put you out of business, Ezra. I mean, the subway is such a great example. There\u2019s so much happening. I mean, I sometimes think you wish weren\u2019t happening. One thing I\u2019ve been trying to do for the last month or so is just do nothing on the subway and just \u2014\u2014 &#8211; Yeah. &#8211; be aware of what\u2019s happening around me. And it\u2019s interesting because a lot of the times I don\u2019t really love what\u2019s happening around me. It\u2019s a rich experience, but, it\u2019s a boom box. It\u2019s the screeching of the brakes. There\u2019s just a lot going on, and dropping the effort of trying to find exactly the right music or podcast or thing on my Kindle to distract myself in the right way. It\u2019s easier to stop. That\u2019s been my big lesson from it. It\u2019s not so much that I love every moment on the subway, but I didn\u2019t quite notice how much energy I was expending trying to block it all out. I would call that a form of meditation. It\u2019s interesting because we didn\u2019t use to have all these devices. I grew up before television, even so. But now that we have the devices, it\u2019s very helpful, actually, to feel the contrast. If you didn\u2019t have anything that drew your attention away, it\u2019s not quite as rich as the contrast between being caught up in your devices and being on the subway with nothing happening. You could say, well, that\u2019s when you get into being bored, but you could also say, Pema, but maybe that\u2019s when you get into being alive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just tell me about how you understand patience. Growing your capacity to hold discomfort. Do you think that that as a general capacity as weakened? And I\u2019m thinking of something&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[9431,57,8849],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Opinion | You Should Sit With Boredom - Frisco Times<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/friscotimes.org\/?p=8884\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Opinion | You Should Sit With Boredom - Frisco Times\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Just tell me about how you understand patience. Growing your capacity to hold discomfort. Do you think that that as a general capacity as weakened? 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