Everything always the same. Repetition presides over processes, from metabolic ones to the passage of time: day, night, light, dark, birth, death, and old age. Having to make a living, having to feed, to get through life is the biggest contradiction of the process, of the dynamics of life. There is continuity only if there is maintenance. Linking dynamics to statics, movement to inertia, is dialectical. Living without contradiction is as desired as it is impossible.

The Guarani Indians, for example, execrated the evil land, hated the One, hated unity. For them, the One is every corruptible thing, and the mode of existence of the One is transient, temporary, ephemeral. The Guarani hated the transitory, the passage, the change, and thought it was generated by the One, which they considered as the incomplete.

We, the Westerners, understand unity as the whole, the nonfragmented, which stands as autonomy and possibility. In this sense, our coincidence in relation to the Guarani is summed up in the admission of unity, the One as a unique possibility of dynamization, that is, change, passage, which is good for us. Divergence arises when, for the Guarani, change, transience is bad. As they themselves say:

… and often we got there, on the beaches, on the borders of the evil land, almost at the sight of the goal, the same ruse of the Gods, the same pain, the same failure: obstacle to eternity, the sea going with the Sun.

(Pierre Clastres, A sociedade contra o estado, 1978, Ed. Francisco Alves, Rio de Janeiro)

There is no eternity, for there is no immobility. The dynamics, the nonpositioning of the fulfilled desires, the happiness that escapes generating monotony and boredom when this dynamic is not accepted. Nothing lasts forever. “Forever” is an abstraction that can only be understood as continuity, and by the implicit maintenance that it imposes, continuity is monotony.

The experience of monotony and boredom is very frequent, as processes, as the present are crossed by expectations fulfilled and generated by evaluations. The mere flow of dynamics, continuity, is not meaningful, does not point to good or bad, and if so perceived it is rhythm, context, landscape. There being no evaluation, there is no insertion of fragmenting and referencing attributes of Why, What For, When. Without interruption, there are no anxiety-generating breakdowns. Anxiety creates monotony because it establishes other landmarks such as rhythms, frequencies that generate expectations by distancing the individual from its experiences. When one is totally involved in what happens at the moment, experiencing it without signifying advantages and disadvantages, there is no intersection, no evaluation of goals, fears, or desires.

Monotony and boredom reflect an exile from the present, which results from not accepting it. If everything is experienced as tedious, the present must be transformed. The first step is to abandon the comfort of routine, repetition, habit. To reach mountains it is necessary to abandon plains, the same way as the journey through peaks could be so habitual that the search for plains would be a difference, a break from monotony. Experiencing what is ahead is always energizing (even if it only fits the criteria of what is considered bad). Dynamization exiles monotony and boredom, as opposed to settling into the adequate that causes punctual convergences in the now stiffening continuity: without autonomy one gets right, one gets wrong, one gets automated. In this case, automating is the plan, the configuration that sets boredom and monotony.