In Praise of Being Bored

When I was nine, my family spent a great many Sundays in a house that smelled of damp wool and radiator dust, and on most of those Sundays it rained. There was a clock in the hall with a tick like a slow, deliberate footstep. There was a window that looked out onto a wet lawn. And there was nothing whatsoever to do.

I want to say this carefully, because the word has acquired a bad reputation. Boredom is now spoken of as a fault, something to be fixed by a screen or a snack or a scheduled activity. But the boredom of those afternoons was not a fault. It was a place. I can still walk around in it.

The slow country

What happens, when you are truly bored, is that your attention loosens its grip on the world and begins to wander off by itself. It goes to odd corners. I once spent most of a Sunday following the progress of a single raindrop down the glass, placing bets with myself on which way it would turn. I gave the drops names. I invented a family tree for them, with a scandal.

It sounds silly, and it was. But look at what I was doing. I was making a world from almost nothing, and I was doing it for no one. No grade, no audience, no usefulness at all. That is a rare condition for a human mind to be in, and I suspect it's where a great deal of private imagination first learns to walk.

What we do instead

Now, when a gap opens in the day, we fill it. Waiting for a kettle, a bus, a friend, we reach for a small bright rectangle and let something else decide where our attention goes. I'm not here to scold; I do it too, constantly. But I've noticed that I rarely have a strange thought any more. My thoughts are mostly responses. They answer what's been put in front of me.

The strange thought, the one that arrives unasked and doesn't know what it's for, seems to need a certain emptiness to arrive in. It needs the slow country. It needs a Sunday with the radiators ticking.

Nothing happens in boredom, and yet it is the place where the mind goes to find out what it thinks when no one is asking.

I wrote that sentence in a notebook last week and then underlined it, which is a thing I almost never do.

A small proposal

I'm not suggesting we abandon the modern world. I'm suggesting we leave a few gaps unfilled on purpose. Stand at the window a little longer than is useful. Walk the long way and leave the earphones at home. Let the kettle boil without watching it.

You may find it unbearable at first. I did. The mind, long fed, objects loudly to being asked to forage. But give it twenty minutes. Something odd and lovely often turns up in the second half-hour, like a deer stepping out at the edge of a field.

I think of my nine-year-old self at that window, naming raindrops, and I feel something close to envy. He had so much time, and he spent it so extravagantly. I would like to spend mine that way again, at least on Sundays, at least when it rains.