Hands-on Boredom

A satis-stim life

I have always had a tendency to feel bored. Ever since I was a child, I was driven by this sense of wanting to do something, to occupy my mind. The last decade and a half of my life has been driven by a deeper and ever-growing sense of feeling, well, bored.

For a long while, I thought it was my job. That having a corporate America job, a 9 to 5, drained me and left me feeling un-enamored by my life. Then I thought it was because I needed to study more, or to write more, or to take classes, or to…

Lately, though, I’ve been figuring something out. And I’ve begun to find it when I engage body and mind, and not in a cardio-pumping way necessarily, but in a ‘let my thoughts go’ way. My boredom is cured when I use my hands.

I noticed it first with manoushe. There is no rushing dough: the pouring of warm water into the flour, the setting of the leban (plain yogurt), the pouring of the olive oil and salt, and the eventual mixing into a shaggy, then smooth and sticky, dough. By the time I am rolling that dough into a flat piece, smoothing the olive oil by hand onto it, sprinkling on the perfect amount of halabi zaatar, something in me has gone quiet.

My thoughts, which could have been on overdrive just 45 minutes prior, are still. And it doesn’t feel like a loss or an absence, but rather, like a calmness, like I’m stimulated, but satisfyingly so. I suppose it’s like food: junk food with its empty calories leaves you wanting more, while a nourishing meal has you walking away from the dinner table satisfied. It’s not the amount, but the quality, of what is being consumed.

And it’s not just the prospect of warm bread that resolves my boredom. No. It’s pottery, that I’ve recently gotten into, hand-building with clay coils a Syrian water jug. A couple weeks ago, I was bored and I couldn’t get my thoughts to slow down. I felt like they were all over the place. So I sat half-outside, half in, at the door to my balcony, as I rolled out clay and made a water jug. I sat there for three to four hours, time slowing down, stretching out before me. I noticed partway how still my thoughts were, how settled I now felt, even as I felt frustrated that the jar wasn’t quite looking the way I wanted it to. And yet, I found myself stimulated even as all I was doing was sitting at my door, my hands coated in brown clay.

And it matters, the type of stimulation you surround yourself with. I’ve spent a dozen years being stimulated. Notifications are stimulation, a packed calendar is stimulation, scrolling is nothing but stimulation, and all of it has left me more bored than ever before. Because, ultimately, what I have been searching for isn’t empty-calorie stimulation, but nourishing stimulation. A satisfying one. Satis-stim, if you will.

This is the same concept I explored in a prior article, where slowing down, rather than ramping up, is actually more fulfilling. And, oddly, in a quiet way, is the more stimulating choice. Considering the hands’ connection in the brain, I’m not surprised that using hands to make things is a big part of this slowing down and satis-stim experience.

In the brain, neuroscientists have mapped a distorted figure called the homunculus, which maps body to cortex. And in the homunculus, the hands are huge—and that’s because much of our sensory and motor cortices are devoted to our hands. When you work with your hands, you’re actually relying and using on a vast network throughout the brain. You’re stimulating many parts in a satis-stim way.

I’ve spent years trying to ‘think’ and ‘do’ my way out of boredom, adding more inputs, more noise, more activity. And all along, I’ve been seeking out junk food instead of zaatar, cheap thrills rather than the deep act of creation.