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How It Started
When I think back to the year 2009, I am still thankful for having the privilege to take the course on Positive Psychology with lectures by Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar. That opened my mind in a deep manner about the wellness model within psychology. His encouragement at the end of the course was to seek ways to promote positive psychology concepts. It was after that when I began to think about starting my blog. Of course negative self-talk filled my mind with -- who would bother to read anything I wrote. Still by reframing my thoughts, I settled on if doing it, even if it helps only a few people live a better life. Writing the blog I felt was worth the effort.
The Role of Boredom
At first thought in 2009, the word boredom came to my mind as I thought through how I viewed how many people live their lives. Then discussions with my College students about how boredom negatively affected their studies and personal lives further intrigued my thinking for the need to encourage positive psychology principles. All of this moved me to read research articles on the subject. It made sense that a life of boredom increases negative effects in daily life. A tragic example of this was seen in the Summer of 2013 in Oklahoma as three teens murdered a college age baseball player as he was jogging. Reports stated the teens were bored and simply killed him for some excitement.
Of course that is an extreme case for most people, the boredom of life means wasting their life away. Too many live below their potential, which I have observed in many college students by their own admission in discussions. I have seen the same in work settings over the years. That is why I stated back in 2009, just OK living is going through the motions with no purpose or meaning. I don’t see it as a way the best way of living.
We were created for a better life than just surviving.
The words of Jesus that inspired my study came from “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life and that they may have it more abundantly." (John 10:10). This is more the way I think we should be living life. Abundant living is living life to the full.
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What is the goal of life?
Boredom steals from our living and destroys and in some cases sadly, even kills. Abundant living and practical ways to live to our full God given potential is what I have always tried to explore ins this blog and hope to continue to do in the future.
The first questions I posed back in 2009 still hold true for me today: How can we continually move beyond boredom to living a joyful and abundant life? A continual growth mindset of “Living More Than OK” realizes that as we grow beyond what is ok in our life we plateau to a new level of ok-ness. So, the goal of abundant living is to not settle on the plateaus, but to keep growing to new levels of “Living More Than OK”. That is what I have been trying to get across in this blog over the years.
Reflection:
How does boredom in life negatively affect you? What are ways you have learned to keep your life moving to new levels of living more than ok?
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