When it comes to things like hurricanes, boredom can be seen as a blessing.  First, my little home in Georgia lost power, and my wife and I resigned ourselves to board games by candlelight.  Then, as she went to sleep early (as pregnant ladies often do), I found myself alone in the dark, left to my own devices, both figuratively and literally.

Then the worst happened… the cell towers in my area went down too, rendering my trusty iPhone practically useless. No more Twitter, no more Facebook, no wife to carry on conversation… just me and a long night of watching the trees surrounding my house bend and crack under the pressure of the gusting wind I could hear clearly even through the walls of my silent home.  Eventually, the darkness became so absolute that I couldn’t even see the trees anymore, and I was left to try to triangulate the locations of the loudly cracking branches by sound alone.

This is the part of tough situations people usually don’t write about.  When telling stories about deployments, people want to hear about rounds flying down range, explosions, air support… so people often gloss over the long stretches of boredom that come between those dramatic events.  Boredom, as we’ve already discussed, is indeed a blessing – it means there’s no looming peril to avoid… but despite its inherent safety, boredom comes with a price.

I am a relentlessly busy guy.  I’m constantly writing, researching, planning another project.  My work hours and the hours I’m conscious usually run in parallel, barring a few hours each evening after my wife gets home.  Part of that is just the nature of this line of work – if there isn’t writing to do for SOFREP, there’s social media stuff to manage, and an ever growing pile of personal projects to work on, but as I sat on my couch alone in the silence, I came to realize my hectic schedule is as much for my mental and emotional benefit as it is a product of my career.  I’m just not any good at sitting on my hands.

Boredom’s dangerous shadow, of course, is complacency.  Spend enough time daydreaming, and you’re bound to stop focusing on the things you know you should.  For me, the power outrage meant most of my recently installed security precautions were also offline, and after the year I’ve had, I was immediately concerned about the possibility of whoever tried to do me harm before returning after the storm broke and I was fast asleep.  Paranoid? Absolutely. Paranoia, I could argue, is one of the reasons I’m still here.

So I started by cleaning a few guns by candlelight. It’s a pleasant chore, and under the right circumstances it’s downright cathartic, though low light makes you a bit more nervous about misplacing anything.  Soon, I was assembling my inbound daughter’s crib, then hanging shelves for her toys, and before you knew it, I was out of work to do inside the shelter of my thinly walled home, and I was again left with only the howling wind outside to keep me company.

I spent the next few hours reading, dozing off, and then waking up in a panic as one of our pets bumped into something in the darkness.  It was a good lesson – since someone lit a fire on my porch a few months ago, I’ve grown increasingly reliant on my security system to notify me when things happened around my house, and without that digital security blanket to shroud myself in, I felt exposed and underprepared.  What were the chances someone would come to my little house in the woods during a tropical storm? Nearly zero, but then, what were the chances someone would set a gas can against the exterior wall of my house and light it on fire either?

See what I mean about the paranoia?