Your eyes glaze over and you glance at the heap of books to read or the stack of dishes by the sink and you sigh. You can’t quite focus. On anything.
The kids are playing or they’re still at school, your boss is on vacation or your spouse has finally taken that weekend with college friends.
Theoretically, you can breathe.
A little.
But you find yourself changing channels with the remote loosely in hand, then absentmindedly turning off the television and wandering to the laundry basket. Or the fridge. Or your unopened emails. Or the bills on the desk by your bed.
And you’re torn.
You tell yourself every damn thing you ought to get done will keep. You have a few minutes to do nothing – to bask in doing nothing, and you’re tempted. But then you think of your child or your teen, or yourself as a child or a teen, and the fact that boredom is bad.
We’ve deemed it bad, and busy – better.
Mindlessness Guilt, Relationship Guilt, Parenting Guilt
The other evening, a friend said to me: “I don’t understand boredom. How can anyone be bored when there are things to read, not to mention the Internet?”
And I agree.
But maybe we’re misusing the word.
Recently I read a delicious piece on Guilty Boredom by essayist Kristen Levithan, describing our tendency to resist surrender to boredom, or even admit to feeling its tug around our emotional edges.
Personally, I make a distinction between disinterest (boredom) and necessary lapses in focus. I am convinced that our knee-jerk interpretation of “busy” with productive, and productive with important does us a disservice. These are smokescreens – self-imposed obstacles so we don’t deal with more pressing issues.
Including what it means to be alone, including consideration of our own needs, including confronting relationship issues not to mention ourselves – what we want and what’s standing in our way; the selves standing in our way.
Beautiful Boredom
But those lapses in focus? The glazing over, the drifting off, the willingness to procrastinate for an hour or even a day? This is the sort of “beautiful” boredom I’d like us to reconsider.
And value.
And embrace.
As I am one who seems unable to meditate, wouldn’t this emptying of the mind – whatever its origin – allow my imagination to kick in and my problems to clarify after a break in churning?
The New York Times offers up its take on the “thrill” of boredom courtesy of Professor Peter Toohey, interpreting the consistent presence of boredom in human behaviors, which can be traced back to antiquity.
The Times article makes a distinction between youthful boredom (and adult unwillingness to sanction its benefits), and the sort of spiritual ennui that those same adults may complain of – an “existential boredom” as Toohey calls it, referring to:
unrelieved emptiness, isolation and alienation. And it takes in many well-known conditions, evoked by such names as melancholia, ennui, mal de vivre, tristesse, taedium vitae, acedia, spiritual despair, existentialist “nausea” — and garden-variety depression.
As for Kristen’s view on boredom, she writes:
I don’t even waste my time on guilty pleasures; I waste it on guilty boredom, clicking here and there, jotting down this and that, and feeling no sense of accomplishment when I’m done.
But what if the sense of “no accomplishment” is the optimal outcome for our need for mental, physical, and emotional downtime?
Step Back, Slow Down
Toohey’s article goes on to explore an alternate interpretation of boredom which I particularly like – as though it stands as a salubrious sentinel – ensuring a slower pace, and alerting us to aspects of life we need to reassess.
He writes:
In real life it [boredom] acts as an early warning that certain situations may be dangerous to human well-being. It’s not unlike disgust, another emotion that helps humans prosper. Just as disgust stops you from eating what is noxious, so boredom, in social settings, alerts you to situations that can do no psychological good. Boredom, interpreted properly, might act as an alarm. It urges you to step back.
This weekend, I took a few hours to “do nothing.” I won’t say I was bored – I wasn’t – but I permitted myself the pleasure of not focusing, not worrying, not attacking my countless checklists – aware that women in particular feel guilt over taking downtime, and I think Kristen would agree – mothers, most of all.
As for my nothingness? My modest measure of lack of focus? Was it thrilling?
Quietly so, yes.
For the audacity of it, and an opportunity to savor my slowing down.
So let’s hear it for the benevolent benefits of beautiful boredom – as vital respite, requisite repose, and ultimately a means to recharge. Boredom as a mini Great Escape. Boredom as punctuation in a run-on sentence. Boredom as a cat nap for the mind – a graceful moment of silence – quelling the voices in our heads, our persistent preoccupations, and those interminable checklists.
I indulge in a little bit of boredom. For me this means disconnecting from all things cyber for a few minutes. Painful.
I suspect that boredom lives in the left brain, a real troublemaker (albeit a task master too, whipping us toward achievement, material prosperity, etc. but a real Wizard defrocked by Toto when the hamster wheel mind stops spinning). The deliciousness and art of doing nothing comes in something akin to an opening of the connecting, appreciating, non-doing mind (hemispherically right, metaphysically calm, emotional without shame, capable of melancholy without alienation… togetherness in pain, pain even as a teacher of expanding, as a cure for what most deeply ails us: the illusion of indifferent separation and subsequent annihilation).
Glad you had a good, not truly bored, but more like transcendent time. And so you say you don’t meditate (when you’ve been practicing disciplined meditation every day… in the form of your writing, which has, in turn, made your ability to do nothing well possible).
Or maybe not. Just saying Namaste either way.
I equate boredom with guilty thoughts, something you alluded to. It is an awful feeling, the idea that we can’t enjoy silence.
My *bored* kids spent an hour today trying to use a swath of pink tulle (sorry, girl stuff) to levitate household objects. Success: flip-flop, television remote control, picture frame, fork.
Fail: Hamster cage.
This is why I am not allowed to take a shower.
OHMYGOD Kitch, I’m rolling on the floor…
(Is the hamster still alive?)
I used to feel the guilt of downtime… then I got divorced, became a 100% single mother. No help. And then I discovered the boredom you describe. A moment to tip my head back on a bench at the park as my children played on the playground. Watching the clouds go by. Perhaps closing my eyes for a moment while lying on the cool grass at a day picnic while the kids napped close by.
I have never been one to feel bored in any situation… one exception: perusing the job boards endlessly… every day for months.
I hear you, NAS. On all counts.
Looks like I need to take a lesson from you and Kristen! I feel guilty if I’m not somehow “productive.” I admitted this to my therapist once and confessed that, at that time, I would spend an hour or so every night just playing mindless word games online. “What is wrong with me?” I lamented. She looked at me like I had two heads.
I hear you, Jane. In this culture – truly – I think it’s something we’ve picked up (like a bug?) when it comes to our method of mothering.
“I also believe that our tendency to equate “busy” with productive, and productive with important does us a disservice… Including what it means to be alone.” Great points here!
“Boredom?” I’m not really going to buy that word if it means no other than a feeling of nothingness accompanied by some unease/irritation. Specifically, dictionary says “being weary and restless through lack of interest.” I love interests, and to not have them is no different from being dead. But if we chose to think of it as the nothingness that opens the way for more, that’s another story.
Was at Quaker Meeting yesterday for an hour of silence. But it was not boring for me — mind going. Backpacking may seem dull to some (frankly, woods can often look indistinguishable one place from another — reason we get lost), but I find it not boring but an opening in another way. But it can eventually get boring… reason I enjoy backpacking and reason I enjoy getting home. Anything done over and over — God help me.
Paul, It sounds like you are – among other things – in favor of the sort of routines that allow our mind to (creatively) wander – for you, backpacking – but not so much routine of any sort that it dulls the very same mind. (Or maybe I’m projecting?)
I have learned, in the aging process, to allow myself that “boredom”. Only I tend to call it relaxation, time for just letting the mind drift and the body go on break. I call it “me” time. In the common sense of boredom, I rarely experience that; although those waiting times in medical treatment facilities or those waiting times while husband decides which molding he wants – those come very close.
Hi D,
Thank you so much for writing this (and for drawing my attention to the NYT article that I had missed in the midst of another weekend of family visitors – yes, really).
It’s funny, it seems as though the act of writing that post about boredom was a sort of release for me. Ever since the discussion that followed, I’ve been finding a lot more pleasure in my “stolen” moments of nothingness. And, excitingly, I’ve had a few big ideas for writing projects come to me while wiling away my time. As you point out, our minds sometimes need to be bored in order to recharge.
I think it’s important to keep talking about this idea to help others (especially women, especially mothers, I suspect) grant themselves permission to do less in our culture of more, more, more.
Merci, my friend.
“Release” – it’s a good word for it, Kristen. Maybe we need to release ourselves from the idea that we must be constantly busy, constantly focused, constantly on a charted path. Glad you are finding it more permissible to give this to yourself. As you say – this “less” can indeed be more.
I have no problem being bored; i.e. not having a constant to-do list to accomplish. When Entrepreneur is out of town, sometimes I take that opportunity to chillax and not. do. a. thing. after work. A glass of wine, an overdue magazine…or just sit on the patio and watch the life in my backyard. Pure bliss.
I equate boredom with white and empty space. It’s stillness I think and I confess I am not comfortable with it. Silence in the mind and my actions pushes me to places I am not ready to confront.
I can’t think of boredom without recalling the Chinese curse–may you live in an interesting time. In an operating room, boredom is the ideal. The last thing you want is for things to get interesting.
Excellent point! 😉