Over the centuries, many religions and philosophers (not to mention mothers!) have feared and even damned boredom. he poet Wordsworth described it as a “savage torpor”. Early Christians classified it as one of the seven deadly sins. Even today, we talk about being “bored to death”, “bored stiff” and “bored to tears”. Crime waves are often blamed on disaffected youths who claim they cannot find anything useful to do.
However, I propose that we reverse this fear of boredom because, in addition to negatively numbed minds, there are also constructively bored minds. If one is brave enough to hang out with boredom for a while , they will find that boredom can be the great motivator and a push to develop one’s inner self.
Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald felt that boredom can be tool for developing creativity. He wrote, “Boredom is not an end product; it is, comparatively, rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.”
Boredom seems to have been the mechanism that prompted me to clear my mind and refocus. Sometimes I’d go for a walk or clean the kitchen. But I didn’t stay bored for long, because I began to look around and notice things I hadn’t seen before – including new thoughts. Maybe the unfocused time had allowed my mind to rest and my subconscious to scan the horizon for a new perspective, which was followed by new interest in the task at hand. For whatever reason, soon I would be back engrossed in productive work. And inevitably, that work would be better than what I was producing earlier.
I remember as an only child feeling bored sometimes (at least that is how it was labeled at the time), especially during summer vacation when my time wasn’t programmed by somebody else. If my mother noticed, she would nag at me to “do something”, then she might create some busy work to try and alleviate my boredom. It seldom worked, possibly because I was stubborn enough to reject her suggestions on general principle, probably because she confused solitude with idleness, maybe because you can’t alleviate somebody else’s boredom for them, and often because I wasn’t really bored, but tinkering, messing about, just looking like I was doing nothing. And sometimes, my cries of boredom were really cries for my mother’s attention, rather than for one of her projects designed to keep me out of her way. Eventually my down time would end and I would find something new and more challenging to do than the busy work she provided. If left alone long enough, boredom motivated me, forced me to lean on my own inner resources, to develop my imagination and to envision wonderful possibilities. Maybe I was subconsciously looking for things that would let me experience flow! And probably there was lots going on in my subconscious while I was bored, which surfaced at some later time.
At other times, I remember being bored because I was disinterested in what the adults around me were chatting about. Bored with the conversation, I would become enthralled with people’s voices and with the sounds of their words and their accents. Later, in the safety of my own room, I would try to replicate those accents, an activity which no doubt increased my vocabulary and trained my ear for future projects.
We certainly would, I believe, be a calmer group of people. One morning, as I sat writing at a wimpy café (churchgate) , I wondered whether all the people speeding by me were really fruitfully engaged in the world, or if their rushing to and fro was mostly an effort to avoid boredom, to keep their minds active and engaged.
What if, I wondered, as I enjoyed the sites and smells of the early morning, more people paid attention to the journey of life, not just the destination? What if they paid more attention to their experiences moment by moment? I suspect they would find that boredom is, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, a filter through which emotions, experiences and, yes, solitude can pass, resulting in a soaring of creativity and imagination – not to mention less stress. They might also find that it can be an alarm bell, motivating us to alter the way we are thinking, living and learning. Unlike caged animals whose neural pathways are altered by their boredom to the point that all they can do is pace, we humans have the potential to break through anything that limits our happiness and creativity, boredom included.
However, I propose that we reverse this fear of boredom because, in addition to negatively numbed minds, there are also constructively bored minds. If one is brave enough to hang out with boredom for a while , they will find that boredom can be the great motivator and a push to develop one’s inner self.
Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald felt that boredom can be tool for developing creativity. He wrote, “Boredom is not an end product; it is, comparatively, rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.”
Boredom seems to have been the mechanism that prompted me to clear my mind and refocus. Sometimes I’d go for a walk or clean the kitchen. But I didn’t stay bored for long, because I began to look around and notice things I hadn’t seen before – including new thoughts. Maybe the unfocused time had allowed my mind to rest and my subconscious to scan the horizon for a new perspective, which was followed by new interest in the task at hand. For whatever reason, soon I would be back engrossed in productive work. And inevitably, that work would be better than what I was producing earlier.
I remember as an only child feeling bored sometimes (at least that is how it was labeled at the time), especially during summer vacation when my time wasn’t programmed by somebody else. If my mother noticed, she would nag at me to “do something”, then she might create some busy work to try and alleviate my boredom. It seldom worked, possibly because I was stubborn enough to reject her suggestions on general principle, probably because she confused solitude with idleness, maybe because you can’t alleviate somebody else’s boredom for them, and often because I wasn’t really bored, but tinkering, messing about, just looking like I was doing nothing. And sometimes, my cries of boredom were really cries for my mother’s attention, rather than for one of her projects designed to keep me out of her way. Eventually my down time would end and I would find something new and more challenging to do than the busy work she provided. If left alone long enough, boredom motivated me, forced me to lean on my own inner resources, to develop my imagination and to envision wonderful possibilities. Maybe I was subconsciously looking for things that would let me experience flow! And probably there was lots going on in my subconscious while I was bored, which surfaced at some later time.
We certainly would, I believe, be a calmer group of people. One morning, as I sat writing at a wimpy café (churchgate) , I wondered whether all the people speeding by me were really fruitfully engaged in the world, or if their rushing to and fro was mostly an effort to avoid boredom, to keep their minds active and engaged.
What if, I wondered, as I enjoyed the sites and smells of the early morning, more people paid attention to the journey of life, not just the destination? What if they paid more attention to their experiences moment by moment? I suspect they would find that boredom is, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, a filter through which emotions, experiences and, yes, solitude can pass, resulting in a soaring of creativity and imagination – not to mention less stress. They might also find that it can be an alarm bell, motivating us to alter the way we are thinking, living and learning. Unlike caged animals whose neural pathways are altered by their boredom to the point that all they can do is pace, we humans have the potential to break through anything that limits our happiness and creativity, boredom included.
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