The Benefits of
Boredom
by Wendy Priesnitz
Having nothing
to do can be a great tool for developing creativity.
Over the centuries, many religions
and philosophers (not to mention mothers!) have feared and even
damned boredom. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard called it “the
root of all evil”. Wordsworth described it as a “savage torpor”.
Early Christians classified it as one of the seven deadly sins. We
talk about being “bored to death”, “bored stiff”, “bored to tears”
and “bored silly”. Crime waves are often blamed on disaffected
youths who claim they cannot find anything else to do.
However, in addition to negatively
numbed minds, there are also constructively bored minds. If one is
brave enough to hang out with boredom for awhile (in oneself or
one’s children), boredom can be the great motivator, a push to
develop one’s inner resources and a tool for creativity.
Here’s what writer F. Scott
Fitzgerald had to say on the topic: “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.”
Many times while writing I have found
myself lingering over the keyboard, considering some new
procrastination tactic, feeling bored and uninspired with my work
and unable to write another word. But I pushed on through those
feelings, past that situation, because I am a writer...and thus
motivated to write (partly because I love the very process as much
as the rewards that come with the product). Actually, as I think
about it, I did more than push through boredom; it pushed me.
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.
Psychologist and author Mihaly
Csikszentmihaly would say I was back into the flow. Csikszentmihalyi
is chiefly known as the architect of the notion of flow in
creativity. He describes flow as “being completely involved in an
activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every
action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous
one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re
using your skills to the utmost.”
So maybe, when we’re bored, we seek
to feel those good feelings associated with flow. In his book Beyond
Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play
Csikszentmihaly examines motivation based on a study of a half-dozen
groups of people involved in pursuits like rock climbing, composing,
dancing and playing chess. He chose these groups in an effort to
understand more fully what motivates people to stop watching boring
television shows and instead, engage in activities that are
extremely challenging or offer few external rewards (like writing a
poem or pondering a chess move). He found, simply (and these are my
words – he seldom writes simply), that the answer is in the high
they get from experiencing flow.
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 writing projects. In the
same way, I once watched my young daughter lying on a blanket under
a tree. As she grew weary with observing the passing clouds and
gently blowing branches, she suddenly sat up and began to point out
faces, animals and other objects that she was seeing above her.
Soon, she had picked up a pencil and was feverishly drawing what she
was imagining. Boredom turned quickly to creativity; doing nothing
had allowed her to “see” things in a new way and inspired her to “do
something” as her grandmother would have worriedly urged if she had
been there.
At any rate, and contrary to my
mother’s concerns, boredom got neither me nor my daughter into
trouble. Nor, as is so often a concern, did it turn either of us
into passive people waiting to be entertained or taught. My life
learning daughter was already fully engaged in the world, eagerly
entertaining herself and others, and actively learning from life. As
for me, I already was a bit inclined toward passivity, as a result
of being trained in school to accept the prospect of repetitive
tasks, rote learning and intellectual conformity. I like to think it
was the boredom of school, combined with my comfort in being alone
born of the solitude of being an only child, in an era of little or
no influence from television, that allowed me to become a prolific
creator.
If that is true, I was lucky. One of
the main things I wanted to avoid for my daughters by allowing them
to learn outside of the school system was the numbing lack of
imagination that has created the repetitive and monotonous way we
deal with learning in the school setting.
Given that most of us experienced
that type of schooling, it is no wonder a distaste for boredom and
drive for diversion is embedded in our culture. Ironically, work,
education and even many of our leisure pursuits often involve what
seem like difficult, unpleasant and boring chores. For too many
people, making a living is something one does not out of joy, but in
order to earn enough money to stay home on weekends and a couple of
weeks in the summer, and on which to retire early. Learning skills
like reading and multiplying is thought to be difficult and painful,
and has to be forced on children. Keeping fit often involves forcing
ourselves to eat things we don’t like and pound the pavement or
pedal to nowhere on a stationary bike once a day. And even our
attempts at entertaining ourselves involve brief diversions through
watching the latest pseudo-reality television show or banal hit song
rather than a joyful flexing of our own creative powers.
Knowing the way life learning
challenges the schooling mentality, just think what would happen if
everyone started to act on the motivation of boredom and look for
ways to live totally in the flow! I am willing to bet that besides a
lot of happy and creative people, we would also have fewer bored,
antisocially behaving young people, but that’s another article.
We certainly would, I believe, be a
calmer group of people. This morning, as I sat writing at a sidewalk
café, 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.
Wendy Priesnitz is the
editor of Natural Life Magazine and Life Learning Magazine, and the author of
Challenging
Assumptions in Education, as well as thirteen other books. This article
first appeared in the
July/August, 2004 issue of Life Learning magazine.
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