Quote of the Week...from Viggo Mortensen

There's no excuse to be bored. Sad, yes. Angry, yes. Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes. But there's no excuse for boredom, ever.                                          ---Viggo Mortensen

Viggo Mortensen is the actor, in case you didn't know it, who so brilliantly played the character of Aragorn, or "Strider", in the wonderful film adaptation to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings a few years ago.  I don't know much about him or his opinions...I haven't even seen him in any other movies...but this quote of his I just found happens to strongly resonate with me. And you know what?  It's the kind of thing I would have expected Strider to say...

I was doing some Internet research on the word "excuse" being used in quotes.  Most of them seemed to tie in the making of excuses with being a failure...sorry, but I'm not totally convinced of this "lift yourself by your own bootstraps" pop philosophy.  There are many factors that can impede people from living the kinds of fulfilling lives they would like to, including disabilities, persecution because of race, gender, physical appearance, religion, having to grow up in an abusive family and/or in extreme poverty or in violent environments, and so on.  If folks are just supposed to shrug off their own negative experiences and plow on, then that sounds to me as if the many problems plaguing human society will never be adequately addressed and solved.  On the other hand, in order to function as an independent adult, one must come to the conclusion that, legitimate excuses notwithstanding, they can still make choices to improve their lives and those of whom they love.  But as Viggo stated, whenever I hear someone come out with the plaintive whine "I'm bored", I wonder what the heck is wrong with them...

There is so much of interest in this limited time that we are accorded in our mortal lives that it simply astounds me that there are people...apparently many, many people...who are incapable of experiencing any wonder at all of the amazing and interesting things around them.  To appropriate a tired old cliché, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to be entranced by space travel, as well as by the wonders in our vast universe.  Look at all the varieties of life on Earth, the different kinds of terrain there are, the different countries and their absorbing histories, the biographies of countless people, the almost endless number of stories...real and fictional...available to us, music in all its forms, and that's just scratching the surface.  No it's absurd to ever be bored...but I think the main reason some like to roll out this lament is that they are so into themselves that the idea of thinking about anything that doesn't directly factor into their own inflated egos is something to be avoided.  So maybe the main cause of this boredom isn't as much a lack of imagination as it is a sense of personal insecurity.  Letting go of oneself for a few minutes and getting into something that doesn't necessarily prop up their self-image apparently is a pretty scary thing for a lot of people, so they end up "bored"...