Being boring

Friday Fragment #25

One of my dear friends once asked me if I thought him boring. His question was blunt and I had no reason to doubt its sincerity, though my initial reaction was to smile and by doing so suggest perhaps that I did. I reassured him that I enjoyed his company and his conversation and so, no, I didn’t think him boring. I can still remember much of that evening: a house party in Bristol, packed mostly with people I didn’t know; the few who I had become acquainted with were friends of a girl I had been dating for a year or so, who I was still the best part of a decade away from being married to. A few weeks after the party, I was looking through photos of the evening with my future wife-to-be. One captured several people with their limbs splayed at irregular angles, wrapped under, above and around one another – a Twister mat beneath them garishly framing their awkward contortions and the high glare of an instant camera flash revealing to me for the very first time the thinning patch of hair on the back of my head. My insecurity around male pattern baldness was short-lived, but the question from my friend stayed with me much longer. Chris was someone who seemed more confident and more at ease with himself than I was with myself. On the evening of that question, part of me had begun to wonder if he had in fact rumbled my own social insecurities: perhaps his question to me had actually been inquiring something of me. My interests back then felt uninteresting, monotonous, meek; my life experience limited; my character small. Perhaps his question was merely a kindness to a fellow introvert, an invitation for an allyship between two people who feared themselves dull. I’ve mulled over his question at various times over the years. Today, I think it bold, not timid; I think it hints at depth, not the shallow. I think that we are each comfortable with who we are today, dullness or not, comforted that we are both like everyone else and like no-one else. I remembered my friend and his question this week whilst being reminded of a quote from the author, André Gide: ‘Please, don’t understand me too quickly.’ Gide’s words speak of the difficulty in understanding, the complexity of another. He knew of our desire to rush into outlining the content and shape of things, not least people, but knew too that people cannot simply be weighed and measured like a bag of flour or a length of string. We calculate in too much of a hurry, and often we judge at a pace yet more swift. I like that Gide quote and think it rewards prolonged meditation. And I’ve always liked the candidness of my friend’s question: that it revealed a little more of him, that I might understand him better, without quite knowing him. It helped me to reveal and understand something more of myself, too. It helped me to trust better in that self, that person, who quite literally belonged to me.

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