Are You Brave Enough to be Bored?

Or, why you should watch the grass grow

Hello, Party People!

I’m sending Sci-Fi Haiku off to the printer today. Once I get my proof copies back, I will be ready to announce a launch date, and I will be talking a lot more about this volume of 600 tiny science fiction stories, each told in seventeen syllables.

I have now written over 4,000 haiku according to my poetry spreadsheet (that’s how big of a nerd I am). One of the main reasons this all started was that I let myself get bored while waiting for my children’s elementary school music program to start.

Boredom is the Creative Tool You’re Too Scared to Use

In the long, languid summers of my teenage years, the air buzzed with a single question. What are we going to do?

Where I grew up, none of us spent the summer at sleepaway camp or rushing between music lessons and rock climbing gyms. At best, we would get five or six days at scout camp or a family road trip. But the responsibility for filling up most summer days fell upon our slouched shoulders.

Our parents went to work and left us to fend for ourselves. Those of us with mothers who worked to maintain the home during the day were ushered out before noon and not welcomed back before dinner at the earliest, with the often unspoken understanding that we should only return right before sunset.

Often around three in the afternoon, unbidden, the lyrics of the 1984 Depeche Mode song, Something to Do, would come into my mind:

I’m going crazy with boredom
Come with me
And tell me

Is there something to do?
Is there something to do?
Is there something to do?
Is there something to do?

Suburban Lost Boys

We had all the freedom in the world, and too often we sat around wishing it away. Now, approaching the half-century mark, I look back wistfully at the luxury of boredom.

What a tremendous gift my generation was given.

At the risk of sounding like the old man who yells at the clouds, boredom is too rare in society today.

Humans believe boredom and tedium to be the great enemies, dulling our minds and lulling us into a sleepless stupor. But the monotony of having nothing to do is a fertile field for imagination and creativity to work their miracles.

Instead of allowing our minds to wander and for ideas to ferment in the activating agent of boredom, children, teens, and adults look at their phones and swipe when any sign of boredom creeps up.

We have instant access to just about any song ever written, any TV show or movie ever filmed, and any video game ever produced. When most of us feel sad, lonely, confused, or bored, instead of retreating into our thoughts or imagination, we drink from a firehose of content and then wonder why we’re still so thirsty.

Our culture of hyper-productivity doesn’t help either. We are bombarded with messages from bosses and self-help gurus that we cannot waste time. Instead, we must always be making something, listening to audiobooks on double-speed or faster, or hustling and grinding our way to riches.

Perhaps this is why so many people are so eager to outsource creative tasks to AI. They can feel good about getting more done without any thought to the quality of the output or what kind of deranged cyborgs we are turning ourselves into when we give up a core part of our humanity, creativity, to machines.

We would rather volunteer to donate our parts to Dr. Frankenstein so he can create his monster than come face-to-face with our true selves by being bored.

Some of my fondest memories are of the times I spent lying on my stomach as a kid, looking at the grass in our yard. Looking at the grass up close, I noticed that each blade was different. The mower blade cropped each blade differently, with their tops having strange angles. Not even the colors of the blades of grass were genuinely uniform. Each one had its unique pattern.

The real magic of the lawn was the world of activity happening where the grass erupted from the ground. My lawn was teeming with an ecosystem I had never before considered. I saw ants, ladybugs, spiders, aphids, crickets, grasshoppers, and dragonflies in my yard.

Because I was so bored and had so little to do, I had to lie down to watch the grass grow. But I came away from all those grass-watching sessions with a creative energy. They fueled my curiosity.

I didn’t understand it at the time, but being bored was what allowed me to have the capacity to learn and create.

Even now, thirty or forty years later, those sessions staring at the grass inform who I am. My drive to create poetry comics and fight climate change took root in my soul when I was just a bored kid. My belief that the world is full of stories comes from my experiences staring at the individual blades of grass.

As parents, we chose not to fill our children’s summer days with activities, camps, and lessons. We let them be bored. This led to some fantastic creativity. One summer, our children wrote a musical together. They all love to draw and doodle. All four of our children love music and play a musical instrument.

They are all still probably on their phones way too much, as am I, but as they have grown and become adults and teenagers, they are not afraid of boredom.

I still struggle against the pressure to create and share something every day. But my best work, my most interesting work, is not done under the pressure of a deadline. Instead, my best work always comes out of periods of restlessness, of boredom.

Great ideas come when we give them time to develop. Boredom is a way to rest your mind, to free up energy so desperate inputs can ferment together in strange, original ways.

The annoying sound of the clock when the house is too silent, the way the woman standing in front of you in line at the grocery store smelled, and the interesting pattern of the plaster on your blank wall are all ingredients for your next creation. Whether you’re a writer, musician, or visual artist, you cannot afford to be busy all of the time.

Your most interesting art will emerge when you allow boredom to collide with curiosity.

The next time you have nothing to do, smile because you are about to embark on a key phase of the creative process.

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Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,