I learnt how to make an origami crane at the age of 12, or maybe it was 13. The instructions came in a faded grey newspaper with the words so smudged you could barely make out the letters. But I didn’t need to read them- the pictures sufficed. The joy of holding up a fully done crane is something I still feel pass me like a sullen breeze as I admire the beautiful model before bringing it up close and examining each crease carefully. I feel a familiar voice urging me to pull out another square piece of paper and make a more perfect model but I resist myself. 200 cranes is crazy enough.

 

Each fold of an origami determines how the next one will perform. A wrong crease can upset the impressionable piece of paper and strain your already tense hand muscles to the point of making a second mistake. And by then, the duplicity of the crease caused by the first wrong fold haunts the remaining process. I became obsessed with the idea of folding the perfect origami crane. 

 

The irony of perfecting a hobby is not lost on me. It is after all the pursuit of futility, but to me it represents something slightly grave. It is an attempt at fostering a ritual and repeating it to perfection. Or maybe they are remnants of a childhood and the echoes of a parent urging me to be better, do better.

 

As an adult I find it hard to orient myself to the fact that my life has become definitively describable through a single sentence. I often find myself saying “I work at X as a Y and do Z on the weekends” and I feel a strong sense of detachment from myself, almost as if my conscience is revolting against what is the whole truth of the situation. 

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And the one thing that bothered me the most of all was being definitively labelled as an employee of X company and although that was the whole truth by my own standards if I was egregiously bad at it there is no way I would associate myself with it. But how else would I describe myself? 

 

I could maybe introduce myself through my passions, but lets be honest. My life is awash with hobbies left halfway- dance clothes that don’t fit anymore, tennis rackets rusting at the back of the shoe cupboard, bottles of paint that have leaked and dried in the goo and spandex gym clothes that I wear around the house sometimes. The remnants of lost passions haunt me in every corner of my home and although the guilt I have exists in decrepit fragments, it sometimes hits me why I left each of them. For the lack of a better word, they had simply gotten boring. 

 

As I grew older I often thought about the nature of boredom and how it leaves 10 half open doors in favour of 20 fully closed ones. Susan Sontag in her diary , As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 writes about boredom and how it might just be a difference in perception.

 

“Boredom is a function of attention. We are learning new modes of attention — say, favoring the ear more than the eye— but so long as we work within the old attention-frame we find X boring … e.g. listening for sense rather than sound (being too message-oriented). Possibly after repetition of the same single phrase or level of language or image for a long while — in a given written text or piece of music or film, if we become bored, we should ask if we are operating in the right frame of attention. Or — maybe we are operating in one right frame, where we should be operating in two simultaneously, thus halving the load on each (as sense and sound).”