If you’re bored, you’re looking past the world’s wallpaper for what’s next. You exchange the incredible texture of reality for momentary flashes of excitement. You swap attending a concert for noticing a leaf. Missing the wallpaper, however, comes at the cost of missing life. How do you step off the dopaminergic carousel and step into the everlasting beauty? How do you deblur the wallpaper to reclaim wonder?

One way to deblur the wallpaper is to infuse it with new meaning. Choose anything around you: a tree, a desk, a cup. Now imagine you’re 40,000 feet tall. How does that recontextualize what you’re looking at? Floor tiles become a geometric miracle of Arctic ice broken into perfect squares. Carpet becomes the ashen remnants of a continental forest fire. Wood grain on your desk becomes an aerial view of unending sand dunes. You deblur the wallpaper through intense observation. With this creativity, you travel, too.

You can also deblur the wallpaper by taking it all away. Take ten seconds to soak in everything around you. Now, close your eyes and imagine it’s all gone. You’re standing in wilderness without a thread of clothing. You have no home, no food, no social connections. Feel the pain of absence. Now return to your abundant world: the local Thai joint slinging handmade noodles until sundown; the couple holding hands and sharing an ice cream cone; the clouds frozen in the windless atmosphere. Suddenly, you have more than you could ever dream of. You deblur the wallpaper through living its opposite. And when your perspective shifts, your story changes.

You’re not bored; you’re acclimated to the miraculous. Returning to the world from 40,000 feet or from losing it all, it becomes incredible again. You get the world that you have already been inhabiting. You’ve been gifted with a life. A life. When we wake up every day wondering what the universe will do for us next, we begin to dissolve into the wallpaper. We become the blur.

But there’s another path. The path includes gliding across the Arctic pentominoes of your tile floor. It includes walking in the aftermath of the conflagration of your carpet. It includes touching the map of sand dunes that stretches out to the clean edges of your desk. It includes losing it all only to gain it all back. Deblur the wallpaper and the wallpaper becomes your prize.