Onward Cultivation and Boredom

For some reason, after coming back from a 1 day meditation retreat today, my mind came back to the difference between Voltaire's "Candide" and Dr. Pangloss. It's a weird thought, yes? If you have never read Voltaire's Candide, you might recognize it as a kind of satire, where Candide represents all the possible misfortunes that a person can go through in life, whereas Pangloss is the quintessential idealist, always theorizing that this is the 'best of all possible worlds' in the same style that Leibniz did.  The two characters nicely suggest a disparity between the ideal concept of how life should unfold and the reality of contingency and accident, as well as the need to continually cultivate one's garden.
  I believe that one of the tensions that practitioners might experience in the course of doing meditation is in fact the 'real' vs the 'ideal'. In the morning of the 1 day retreat, I have to admit that I was stoked as always, and coffee certainly didn't hurt. I think that when I am entering the retreat for the first time, I always have the best intentions, and hope that the energy I invest into it will pay off in the afternoon when my mind gets off the coffee high and starts to slow down a bit. What I observed today, however, was the opposite. I started to realize that it's not the intention or the 'drive to create' that impels meditation, but in fact the exhaustion of all these possibilities that opens up a space to explore and behold. In the afternoon today, I had this sense that although I was not as energetic to pick up my method as in the morning, I saw the value of being more grounded and seeing the contrivances of trying to 'get the most of meditation' using the mental strategies that often accompany a good cup of coffee.
   What I experienced this afternoon was a kind of observation of thoughts as 'bubbles' lacking in any permanent significance. Every so often, I would use these bubbles to inquire: who creates the bubbles, and where do they come from? Although I could not sustain this practice for long given lack of sleep from the previous night, I found that not adding anything special or auspicious to the experience made the practice somehow more like an enriching discovery. Even when boredom was faced in the afternoon, it was a kind of interesting boredom, if you could call it that. Why? Because there is something actually intriguing about how the mind goes to boredom in the late afternoons of meditation retreats, and I am inclined to observe it carefully and almost respectfully. Although boredom is often considered a 'bane' of a productive and overworked society, it can in meditative circles be very wonderful to observe boredom's dynamics and figure out how to be truly in it without trying to make it into something more glamorous. This is what makes boredom a meditative practice in its own right.