When Paradise Gets Boring

I was in a foreign country when some type of coup broke out. The whole city lost power, and from my vantage point on the street, I could hear gunfire as a militia group went floor-by-floor through a darkened hotel building, executing everyone they found.

But then I woke up, and my real life—which I had progressively come to regard as mundane—felt like a newly discovered paradise.

I beheld my white sheets, sunlight streaming onto them from the open window above my bed—an open window through which I heard chirping birds and the quiet morning streets of southern California, not the harsh barking of gunfire—and felt a happiness beyond measure.

In an instant, I went from weighing the merits of making a run to the border to escape a literal hell, and thinking about what it would finally be like to die, because I am going to die tonight, I know for a fact that this time it’s really going to happen and I’m not prepared, I’m not ready at all—

—to scrolling through my Substack feed without a care in my mind.

Somewhere in the world right now, there is a person. This person is just like me—they need to eat and drink, they like to laugh, they probably want to fall in love someday, and they definitely don’t want to die. They have a name. This person has witnessed—or is witnessing at present, in real life—those very same horrors from which I was so easily able to escape by simply opening my eyes.

They have no such way out. Fear, dread and nausea are their default states. They spend hours fantasizing about what it would be like to live my “mundane” life—and were they magically dropped into my shoes for even a single day, they would likely spend the whole first hour on their knees in thanks to God.

I remember being struck by this quote from The Hobbit movie, when Thorin, at the moment of his own death and at the end of their harrowing journey, says to Bilbo, “Farewell, Master Burglar. Go back to your books, and your armchair. Plant your trees, watch them grow.”

I feel the thirst for adventure probably more than anyone else I know, but may I never forget that a mundane and simple life—with features such as books and armchairs, gardens and trees, friends and card games and coffee—so long as it comes with peace, is truly one of the high points of human existence.

Peace and quiet are not the natural states of the world. They’re not waiting there for you when everything else is taken away. This type of life is earned by the blood and tears of generations of courageous, yet fallible men and women, and maintained at present by the same.

If you’re experiencing such a life now, know that it’s far from ordinary.

It’s an unimaginable delight.