The benefits of boredom: Why empty spaces fill me up

I would like to be able to say that, as a child, I was never bored. The truth is that there were occasional stretches when I found myself standing by the window, staring into the nothingness. It wasn’t until years later that I saw the value in such downtime. For me, part of growing up was to recognize boredom for what it was and what it became: not something to lament, but rather a gift of time, and a springboard to reanimation and creativity.

These are the thoughts that occurred to me at the end of my recent teaching semester. I was walking across campus when I spotted one of my students sitting on a bench, her face inclined toward the sun, her eyes closed, her expression serene. I went over and asked if I could sit with her. When I asked how she was doing, she explained that her phone had “crashed,” and she was bored.

I tend to blame a lot of things on the electronic age. The columnist David Brooks once wrote that the internet and social media offer stimulation, but not intimacy. This, in my mind, has conditioned us to feel that there has to be something going on every moment. The truth is that the computer, the internet, and the smartphone yield information that is constantly new. Therefore, when we are not online, we feel that we are missing something.

Enter boredom. We need empty space. Otherwise, we spend our days responding and responding, feeling that we have to react to every ping and alert.

I now realize that’s how it was with my childhood boredom. When I look back, I recognize the young boy standing by the window, staring out into the great beyond. But those were moments in time, mere retooling periods, as if my brain needed respite to process the day and all that had happened. I needed to put my transmission in neutral and idle for a while.

Albert Einstein was thought to have said, “The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.” For me, this was true, and before I knew it, I was again engaged in creative play: building models, climbing the sycamore in front of my house, practicing my clarinet, and running through the New Jersey streets with my fellow mischief-makers. In short, the bout of boredom allowed my spirit to rekindle the desires that made me happy.

I didn’t tell all this to my student. But my experience did inform the conversation I decided to have with her. “What are your personal interests?” I asked.

Her eyes sparked. I soon learned that she was an artist. She opened her backpack and showed me some stunning pencil sketches. I asked her if she ever felt bored when she was drawing. Her response: “How could I be bored when I’m doing what I love?”

Now we were getting somewhere. I asked if ideas came easily to her. “No,” she said. “Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth.”

“Does that frustrate you?”

“No,” she responded, “because I know that something will eventually pop into my head. When it does, it’s a real rush of satisfaction.”

That was it. That was exactly it. She needed to walk in the desert before arriving at the oasis. She needed to know a complete lack of inspiration before it struck her like a bolt from the blue.

This must have been what Ralph Waldo Emerson meant when he wrote, “Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. ... Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.”

And so my greatest wish for my student was that she would continue to sit on that bench, and think, and ponder, and finally draw. I couldn’t solve her phone issue, but I did have three parting words for her.

“I envy you.”