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Boredom

from Holiday by Slow Leaves

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lyrics

Boredom
(Written by Grant Davidson)

In the morning I enjoy having nothing to do. I like to spend my time by pondering how to use it. Maybe every child is born an artist but it seems to me we can no more hold on to that piece of ourselves than we can to childhood. I’m not saying there’s a net loss, necessarily. It just seems that the inescapable experience of a time moving only forward nevertheless shapes who we are in all ways imaginable and otherwise.

There’s a feeling of endless possibility that I associate with my younger self; an artifact no doubt of being raised under middle-class fantasies. As a child, I kept an old cookie tin full of coins in the back of my sock drawer. It had an idyllic painting on the lid: A New England farmhouse; kids playing on the lawn; farmer, oxen and plow working the field; that kind of thing.

I would hold up a handful of my imagined riches and feel the cold weight of the coins jangle through the cracks between my fingers. It was easy to be rich then in the quiet of my bedroom. Now the alchemy of turning nickels into gold is lost to me, lost to time. Maybe the full bloom of that secret still grows somewhere in a scrub garden along the backside of that New England farmhouse, portrayed I wonder, under the shadow of some other sleeping kid’s dresser drawer.

This year I turned forty. I know that some secrets need the pressure of an absence to unfold. Some never do. I’m feeling my own pressure. Some mornings I find myself trying to hold up time; to feel each second slip one by one between my fingers like those old coins.

I hope by some crude combination of greed and generosity I can save a little time, maybe just by noticing it. Eventually perhaps I could fill another tin. I hope one day to know a fortune of boredom, where in my richest hour I can lie half asleep, one eye open to the light of a crumbling sun looking in, me looking out, and know I didn’t dream too little.

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from Holiday, released September 10, 2021

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Slow Leaves Winnipeg, Manitoba

Grant Davidson, known professionally as Slow Leaves, is a Canadian singer, songwriter, and musician. His music could exist as comfortably in the ‘70s as it does in today’s age of curated images and hollow soundbites, when vulnerability can be seen as defiance and sincerity as radical. ... more

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