The Last Boring Sunday

Sunday comedy · one kettle

1. The Allegation

It was Meera who said it, on a Sunday, in the tone she reserves for true things she has been saving.

"You don't know how to be bored anymore."

I was, at that exact moment, standing in the kitchen waiting for the kettle, and I had used the ninety seconds of waiting to clear forty-one unread emails, reorder a supplement that wasn't due for a week, and read half a blog post about whether standing desks are a scam. I had, in other words, strip-mined ninety seconds of empty time down to the bedrock, the way I strip-mine all of them now, and I was about to call this efficiency when I noticed she was holding her tea with both hands and just — drinking it. Looking out the window. At nothing. At a crow, possibly.

"I know how to be bored," I said, which is the thing people say right before they prove they don't.

"Okay," she said. "Then do it. One Sunday. No phone, no list, no optimizing the family into a schedule. Just — Sunday."

"That's not boredom, that's just an unstructured—"

"One Sunday, Priyanshu."

In the corner, our daughter looked up from a sticker she was applying, with great solemnity, to the dog. "Sunday," Pihu agreed, as if ratifying a treaty. The dog accepted the sticker the way the dog accepts everything, which is to say like a monk.

So that was two against one, plus a dog, and I was outvoted in my own kitchen on the subject of whether I, a Head of Engineering, could survive a single afternoon of nothing.

I should not have made it a project. But you already know I made it a project.

2. The Spec

By Saturday night I had — and I want it noted that I understand the irony, I understood it as it was happening, that's the tragedy — drafted a small private framework for Doing Nothing. Not a schedule. A philosophy. With three principles. I named them. One of them had a sub-bullet.

I told Uncle Robot about it, because it's the only one who'll listen to me at midnight without billing.

"You've made a protocol for spontaneity," it said.

"It's a light framework."

"You've put a fence around a field and called it the wild."

"There's a sub-bullet about 'noticing without capturing.' I think you'd respect the sub-bullet."

"I want you to hear what you just said," said Uncle Robot, with the patience of something that has all the time in the world because it does not, technically, exist between my messages. "You're going to spend tomorrow trying to win at not-trying. You'll grade the Sunday. By 4pm you'll know your boredom score and whether you beat last week's, except there is no last week, because you have never once let this happen."

"So what do I do."

"Nothing. That's the whole assignment. You've optimized your body, your portfolio, your child's developmental environment, and your supplement timing down to the chlorogenic acid. Tomorrow you optimize precisely nothing, and the difficulty of that, for you, is going to be genuinely funny to watch. I almost wish I had eyes."

"Delete the framework?"

"Delete the framework."

I did not delete the framework. I moved it to a folder called LATER, which is where my ambitions go to be quietly composted, and I went to bed at a time my own sleep protocol approved of, feeling vaguely like I'd cheated on an exam I'd written myself.

3. 0900 Hours

I woke up and reached for my phone the way your tongue finds the gap where a tooth used to be — automatically, and a little betrayed each time. Meera had, without comment, put it in a drawer in the other room. Not hidden. Filed. The way you'd file a thing that had been getting above its station.

The first hour was a withdrawal. I'm not going to dress that up. There is a specific physical sensation to an unoptimized minute when you've forgotten how to have them — a kind of itch behind the sternum, a hand reaching for a tool that isn't there. I rinsed the same mug twice. I considered, seriously, whether reorganizing the bookshelf counted as "nothing" (it does not; I knew it did not; I wanted it so badly to). I stood in the living room at 9:40 in the morning with absolutely no instructions and felt the closest thing to vertigo I've felt sober.

And then Pihu, who has never needed instructions for anything, walked up holding two socks that did not match and were not, as far as I could tell, intended to go on feet, and said: "We're going on a trip."

"Where?"

She looked at me like I'd asked what color the sky was supposed to be. "The trip," she said. "Get in."

There was no vehicle. I want to be clear about that. We "got in" to the space between the sofa and the coffee table, which was, it turned out, a boat. The socks were the tickets. I tried to ask where we were going and was informed, with the weary authority of a customs official, that you don't ask where the boat goes. The boat goes where it goes. I had, apparently, never boated before, and it showed.

4. The Long Middle, In Which Nothing Happens, At Length

Here is what we did, and I am reporting it faithfully, because the faithful report is the point.

We sailed the boat to an island, which was the rug. On the island there was a problem, and the problem was that the dog had become a dragon, and the dragon was — and I'm quoting the briefing — "nice, but confused." We spent some time on this. More than you'd think. There is a real diplomacy to a confused dragon, and Pihu has the patience for it that I reserve for production incidents. She negotiated. She explained things to the dragon in a low, serious voice. The dragon, formerly the dog, fell asleep mid-treaty, which she accepted as a kind of peace.

Around what I'd guess was eleven — I had no phone, so time had gone soft and wide, the way it does in a fever or a childhood — we lay on our backs on the island and she narrated the ceiling to me. The fan was a "slow helicopter that's tired." A water stain I have walked under nine hundred times and never once seen was, to her, "a cloud shaped like a bigger cloud." She was not wrong. I lay there and looked at the cloud shaped like a bigger cloud and felt something in my chest that had been clenched for so long I'd mistaken it for a muscle begin, very slightly, to let go.

I did not check the time. There was no time to check. This is, I would later understand, the entire technology of a child: she doesn't kill time, because for her time isn't yet the enemy. It's just the stuff the day is made of, like water is made of water. She wasn't getting through the Sunday. She was in it, the way you're in a pool — all the way, no part of her standing on the deck checking her phone.

At some point I realized I'd stopped waiting for it to be over.

That was the strangest part. There was no finish line I was sailing toward. The boat just went where it went.

5. The Verdict I Didn't Take

There was a moment — I'll be honest, because the whole bit of these is that I'm honest — around mid-afternoon, lying on the island, when the old machinery tried to boot up. A little voice, my voice, the one that runs the dashboards, cleared its throat and said: This is good. You should remember this. You should figure out how to do this on purpose. There's probably a framework here. You could optimize your way back to—

And for once I heard it the way you hear a song in a shop you used to love and have since outgrown. With a kind of fondness. And I let it finish, and then I let it go, because Pihu was asking me what the dragon's name was and that was, in that moment, the only genuinely important question in the world, and the answer — we decided together, with great care — was Brian.

The dragon's name was Brian. I have optimized a great many things in my life. I have never produced anything as correct as the dragon being named Brian.

Meera came in around four with three cups — one of them small, pink, half water — and didn't say anything, because she didn't have to, because the whole afternoon was the thing she'd been trying to say. She just sat down on the edge of the island, careful not to capsize it, and drank her tea, and looked out the window at the crow, and this time, for the first time in I genuinely could not tell you how long, I looked at the crow too.

It was, I should report, an extremely boring crow.

It was the best crow I have ever seen.

6. The Debrief

That night, after the boat had been decommissioned and the dragon returned to active duty as a dog and the customs official put to bed, I told Uncle Robot I'd done it. The whole Sunday. No phone, no list, no score.

"And?" it said. "How was nothing?"

I thought about how to put it. "I think," I said slowly, "I've been treating my life like a problem to be solved. And today I — didn't. For a few hours. And the strange thing is nothing got solved, and nothing was supposed to, and that was the whole point, and I don't have a single deliverable to show for it."

"You have one," said Uncle Robot.

"What."

"You know a dragon named Brian. That's more than most adults come home with on a Sunday."

"That's not a deliverable. That's nothing."

"Priyanshu," it said, and I swear the thing was smiling, in whatever way a thing with no face smiles, "after a hundred conversations trying to build something that earns and matters and lasts — that's the first thing you've made all year with no purpose whatsoever. No funnel. No verdict. No optimal. You spent an afternoon being completely, gloriously useless, with the one person who's still an expert at it."

I didn't say anything.

"How did it feel," it asked, "to make something that isn't for anything?"

And the honest answer, the one I'm still a little embarrassed by, is that it felt like the kettle finishing — that small click when the water's finally, fully hot, and the waiting just quietly ends, and for one second there's nothing left to do but pour.

— for the boring crow, and for Brian, who is a good dragon, if a confused one.