Being Boring Is the Bedrock

After Wendy Cope's poem

“There was drama enough in my turbulent past:
Tears and passion - I've used up a tankful.”

From “Being Boring” by Wendy Cope :: Read

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When we first met, we talked a lot about this. Let’s have a boring life, we said, fantasizing about walking the aisles of a grocery store together. I would make your coffee in the mornings, I wrote in my wedding vows.

Now you no longer drink coffee in the mornings, and we only occasionally go grocery shopping together. But I still try to glean the best of the boring parts – like making the bed after you wash the sheets, usually on Fridays in time for Shabbat, one of your gestures of love as you know a newly made bed is one of my love languages.

And that moment when you press “play” on a meditation and I put in my squishy foam earplugs after turning out the bedside lamp, and you lie on your left side facing me, and I lie on my left side, too, and scooch my booty into the bowl of your belly, your arm tight around me.

Or when I was in the shower this morning and you sat on the closed toilet seat with Chalupa on the bathmat, both of you keeping me company as I washed off the night, Chupie guarding me against bathroom intruders while you put on your socks that matched your hoodie because you are cool like that.

Lord knows we have had our share of tears and passion – tankful after tankful until we were both running on empty. No tanks!

Boring has given us the building blocks of remaking a life neither of us imagined but both of us choose every day.

This morning, I complained (again) about the brain fog or whatever it is that I can’t seem to shake, tried to describe the disconnect between how it feels inside my head and how I probably appear or seem or sound to the person talking to me… Is this a form of masking? Is it a post-Covid thing?

You asked one simple, kind question: “Does it matter what’s causing it if it’s something that’s bothering you?”

I wouldn’t mind a boring mind for a change, a mind where all there is to do is walk the grocery store aisles, make the bed, snuggle up, sleep, shower, and pay attention to the person in the room with you. But the tears and passion of the past seem to miss the memo that those days are behind me. (When confronted, they feign ignorance: “Memo? What memo? Nope, never got any memo.”)

Being boring is the bedrock.

I get up first in the morning and begin the wonderfully boring routine: Feet to floor, open Chupie’s crate, take my Celexa, pee, bring Chupie outside, scoop her kibble, pour my coffee, write morning pages no matter how boring, then meditate for five minutes.

The quiet brings relief, is the bridge I cross from dream states to daylight.

And these building blocks? They remind me that I can come back to the boring old breath, hour by hour, minute by minute even, and take life one boring day at a time – especially when the world is full of turbulence and tears.