Only Boring People Get Bored

By Evette Gardner
Author of Divine Heritage / May 2009


I tell this to my little cousin all the time and he can’t stand it. Every time he starts complaining about how boring something is I challenge him with, “Only boring people get bored. “ The first time I said this to him his response was, “What’ s that supposed to mean?” And I explained to him that really interesting people know how to make anything, no matter what it is, exciting (at least to and within themselves). I used the example of a party that starts out slow and dull until one person walks in and suddenly it becomes a real celebration! But if the music was just as lively, and the food was just as good, and nothing about the decor has changed, and all the folks that were there for company before are still there… and the only thing that’s changed is this one person’s arrival, why weren’t all those people having a good time before this person showed up? Why should one person make all the difference? Because that party was full of a bunch of boring people that’s why? Every one of them was simply waiting on someone else to step forward and be the “life of the party.” But why couldn’t they do that for themselves? This is a situation where you have a group of people who have lazy imaginations. They stand around and wait on someone or something to come along and entertain them because they don’t know how to entertain themselves. They don’t know how to generate their own excitement and interest.

It often gets overlooked, but having an active and robust imagination is fundamental to living a satisfying and fulfilling life experience. Usually when we think about living our dream life we tend to think about acquiring material things or about having our image of the ideal life situation happen to us (such as winning the lottery or becoming some famous something-or-other). But having a satisfying and fulfilling life experience is not really so much about having everything go our way as it is about our ability to make the best out of whatever comes our way - regardless of what it is. And this ability is driven by the scope and fervor of our inner musings. Ultimately it’s not really what happens to us that determines the quality of our experience, it’s what we tell ourselves about what happens to us that decides the quality of our experience. We each write the script that is our life experience, and we write it with our inner dialogue.

What you tell yourself about the situations that arise in your life, and the circumstances you find yourself in, matters a great deal. Why is it that really young children have the ability to turn even the most seemingly mundane thing (such as a rock, a stick, or a paper towel holder…) into a prop in an entertaining pass-time that they can carry on for hours if left to their own direction. Why? Because their imaginations are unhindered. Everything is interesting to them because their use of their imagination makes it interesting.

Imagination is one of the gifts endowed to you by Spirit. It is fundamental to your capacity to employ your limitless creative power. With it no matter how many lemons life may give you in situation you have the ability to turn those lemons into experiences of lemonade, lemon pie, lemon icies, lemon… you choose.

Your experience in life is based on feelings not events. Take four people that grew up in the same household, were raised by the same parents, took the same family vacations, were nurtured by the same community… and still you will be hard pressed to get any two of them to agree on what the experience was like. Fill a stadium with five thousand spectators watching the same sporting event and ask them all to describe their experience of this spectacle. And even amongst this large pool of people, no two answers will be exactly the same. Each one will have their own unique take on what if felt like to sit in on this one event because each one’s imagination will invent its own unique story about what happened.

The stories we tell ourselves determine the moods we create within ourselves. And this is our life experience. It’s what we feel, it’s not what we do or what’s done to us. And since imagination is the great story teller, it is through this mechanism that we have the power to create any experience we want for ourselves. An active imagination can tear down borders and free many a perceived limitation. When you find that things aren’t as you would like them to be, through the power of your imagination, you have the ability to transform them into exactly what you want them to be. But with imagination, it’s just like the adage says, you have to use it or you risk losing it. You have to exercise your imagination or it will become lazy and sluggish. And that’s when you will become one of the boring people. One of the ones who wait for things to happen for them instead of making things happen for themselves. This is not a fault; it’s simply serves as an indication to you that you are not living your life to its fullest potential.


Evette Gardner can be reached at Comments@YourDivineInheritance.com
© 2009 Evette Gardner