I went a bit more into this scientific view of boredom, and it turns out there's a lot of interesting research on it. And the one thing that I learned is that there's no universal definition of boredom, even though it's a universal human experience, the most common indicators or symptoms of it are, and these will sound familiar, inattention, lack of engagement, absent mindedness and the experience of time passing slowly, time passing slowly, not quickly, which is what happens when we're absorbed in our practice. One of the studies I came upon was described in a hidden brain podcast titled even astronauts get the blues. Why boredom drives us nuts. The host, Shankar vedantam, interviews several experts where they discuss the psychological effects of long term space flight. Long story short, NASA scientists have observed a very unusual phenomenon in the eating behavior on the International Space Station. What they observed is the gradual increase in consumption of hot sauce. Yeah, hot sauce by the astronauts. So as time passed on, the longer they were on the space station, astronauts tended to eat more and more hot sauce. Here's an excerpt from the transcript describing why. Why this might be. One explanation is that the absence of gravity causes physical changes in the body and that weakens your sense of taste. Another idea, small, enclosed places like spaceships are really stinky. Tobacco hides the smell, then there's boredom. Now it may be hard to imagine. Astronauts getting bored. But think about spending weeks looking at the same loose hanging wires, the same floating co workers, the same blue planet, the same small window. That's where the tabascobasco sauce comes in. So one hypothesis for the reason for more hot sauce is that lack of sensory stimulation from your environment that you're compensating for it by putting hot sauce on. So yes, there's not a lot of colors in your environment, but you can have colors in your mouth. So there you have it. Even even astronauts, who arguably have the most awesome job in the world, get bored, and they find a way to relieve it. And it doesn't require too much imagination to compare the situation of astronauts to doing zazen, especially doing it in the Zendo and much more so doing it in sashin. The environment that we practice in is pared down. It's designed to minimize distractions, sitting still in silence, facing the same blank wall or divider, wearing the same brown robe, using the same mats and cushions, doing the Same thing together in lock step with one another, sitting, walking, chanting, eating the same meals as is in sashin, Following the same schedule day after day. And then there's the practice we're working on, whatever it is, it's very simple. Just keep returning to the breath, keep returning to the koan over and over again. So when you when you factor in human evolution and our social conditioning combined with the simplicity, and you could say starkness of Zen practice, it's no wonder that so many people report feeling bored at times.