The Saturday Morning Post: Allow Yourself to Get Bored, To Get Creative

I remember being bored as a kid growing up, the farm was isolated, and time often dragged on. Over the years I have done some very boring work, traveled for long distances alone, spent a few weeks in the hospital unable to get out and about without help. Boredom does interesting things to our brains, it triggers thoughts, ideas, ways of entertaining our minds. It helps us find the connections between ideas that are seemingly unrelated. That was one of my strengths when I was working, I spent long days contemplating questions, problems, challenges in my brain, then it would hit me, how we could see the issue in new ways, how we could find a new way through the debris field of failed ideas.  

We need that bored time. I have read a couple of article this year, about the need for quiet time, time to allow ourselves to become bored. We tend to fill every waking moment with something.  A few months ago, I was overseeing the removal of art works in the community center, I had asked people to pick up their works by 10:00 AM, it was just after 9:30 and there were a few left to be picked up, before we moved the back-up plan of moving them to storage. I could have sat there, and doom scrolled on my phone, I decided I would go spend 30 minutes on the treadmill. 

Usually when I am on the treadmill, I watch streaming video on my IPad, but this was an unplanned block of time, and I didn't have my IPad with me. I decided this was a great opportunity to let myself be bored, for just 30 minutes, I would walk on the treadmill in silence, with just the birds outside the window for diversion. Before I knew it, I as seeing things I didn't know were there, flower buds on a tree, young birds. I started thinking about how the colors were changing on the hillside outside that window.  I found myself being creative in ways that I would not have been, if I was watching my favorite YouTube channel about sketching. Both are good for me, both are needed, but the boredom time is in short supply. I need to drop out, turn off the noise more.