The Gift of Necessary Boredom
We’ve all got our ways to cope (or not) with the world chaos, and mine is to deliberately section myself away from outside stimuli right now—my effort to find necessary boredom, the phrase I once heard from one of my writing heroes, Dorothy Allison. Allison passed away in November but her legacy remains. Necessary boredom is what lets me create.
Other writers I admire echo this idea, that we need to slow down enough to reach a state of nothing happening inside, no agitation from the outside world, in order to hear our own creative voices.
This month, I’ve also been reaching back to the work of New England essayist and poet Christian McEwen.
I first came across McEwen’s book, World Enough & Time, at a time of my life when slowing down was an anathema to me. My pace was fast as I juggled motherhood, a growing publishing career, a move, and a new marriage. I had no idea when and how to take a breath.
Do we have enough time to be bored?
McEwen’s gentle persistence is that “not enough” is something we adopt, not our birthright. At first, the concept seemed ludicrous. Gradually, though, I got a little tired (bored?) of the sameness of my rush. I needed a new perspective. So I followed her advice and set aside time to consider what the rush was giving me and if I did indeed have a choice about it.
Parents, especially working mothers, may stop reading at this point. I get it. Responsibilities feel endless, but step by step, one change at a time, I was able to pick up reading for pleasure again. Then a walk several times a week that was more than exercise but a chance to expand my view of my life. Eventually I was able to expand my art and writing time. I was able to drift a bit, let go.
The holidays are an insane time to consider this, but with some of them behind us now and the new year ahead full of possibilities, I’m making an effort.
Are you already choosing what you want to bring into your creative life in this new year? Perhaps the busy mental life, the constant surges of adrenaline, keep us too far from the stillness and dreaminess of the creative life. I can’t say for you. But for me, seesawing between extremes was very hard on my creative spirit.
Boredom, actually, is a sign of health. Or so I found out.
Fear of boredom
If you’ve read this far, you need to know I have never been a fan of boredom. My legacy was a mom who had been a pilot, who now worked full-time (plus) while raising four kids. She was super intelligent, but she worked harder than anyone I knew. Constantly juggling, constantly behind.
I asked her about this, as a child. Whether being so busy all the time was something she loved. And, surprisingly, she said yes. Definitely better than boredom, she told me. She would deliberately not finish a task because she wanted to be sure to have something to do the next day.
I remember her telling me her worst fear was having nothing to keep her mind and hands busy. I heard it all through my childhood: there’s nothing worse than being bored. When I became an adult, I began to emulate this pace. Not one job but two. Not one Thanksgiving to attend but three, like house hopping (this is true!).
Truthfully, it’s made me a little frantic, all my life, this fear of boredom.
Boredom in the creative life
I used to think boredom was a simple state of mind—when you don’t have anything to occupy yourself, when you feel uninspired by your job, your life. But in the creative sense, it’s much more than that.
Creative boredom runs the gamut from restless about your current writing project to feeling no energy and no interest in it. This can bring agitation, worry for the future (will nothing inspire me ever again?), and at the extreme, despair about even being a writer. (I am not trained in anything resembling psychology, so I am only speaking here about boredom in the sense of the creative life.) When we can’t create, something inside dies.
Ironically, when the world is in crisis, boredom can put us into a kind of limbo, as Margaret Talbot writes about in this pandemic-era piece for The New Yorker.
But underneath feeling bored—what’s really there? That’s what my mother never slowed down enough to teach me. I learned it through two very serious illnesses, when I was literally unable to do anything for months except lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. Being very ill is extremely boring, at least to me, but it taught me to step back and see which emotion is really running the show when I feel bored.
If I’m truly disinterested, say, in my writing, is there agitation and worry underneath it, coming from something in my life? An underground distraction that first needs to be addressed? Check out Dr. David Hanscom’s technique of writing out the worry and tossing the page, which I’ve found extremely effective in separating from the problem so I can see what’s rumbling underneath.
Boredom, for me, often hides burn out. Maybe it’s not the writing that’s the cause, but not sleeping well, not being out in nature, too much brain fatigue from the news or world worry. Maybe I am stewing over a difficult decision or about to take a huge risk creatively. The inner gatekeeper can use boredom to keep me from risking—and in that case, boredom is a confusing illusion that masks the real concerns.
Over the years, weaning myself from my mom’s approach to boredom, I’ve come to believe my writing, my creative work, is rarely the cause of this inner stagnation. But it could be the cure.
Using boredom as a gateway
Long ago, I wrote down that quote from writer Dorothy Allison (that I sadly cannot substantiate today—if you can, please post below!). The concept of “necessary boredom” struck me so deeply, turning my learning on its head.
McEwen continued the teaching with the idea that by allowing such moments of inner drifting, deliberate stillness, and the non-stimulated time so akin to what we call boredom, we tap into resources we can’t when we are constantly stimulated from the outside.
You may be much younger than me. But I grew up in a time before the internet and kids didn’t have much in the way of entertainment, except books and what I made for myself. Because my mom worked full-time, I also didn’t have constant activities planned for my day. We walked home from school (yep, that kind of childhood), and we were on our own. My dad didn’t let us watch much TV, but everyone read books. So we read and explored the neighborhood. I’d get on my bike and ride around the reservoir near our home. I did art. I cooked. I made things. I played with other kids. I wrote a little. I lay on the grass and stared at the sky.
I was often bored. But that kind of boredom is just what was necessary to foster my creative spirit. Now, looking back, I think it was good for me.
From these moments of nothingness, I got ideas. If I stayed in the stillness long enough, it showed me a next step.
Inner critic
Earlier, I mentioned that gatekeeper that tries to keep us safe, prevent creative risks that might harm us. You might call it the inner critic. In these moments of stillness, it can bring in a sort of agitation. Shouldn’t you be doing something more productive? is how it talks to me now.
When I hear this voice inside, I know it’s coming from this mechanism that most creative people have, the part of the psyche that tries to keep them safe.
If I start getting bored with a piece of writing I’m working on, if it starts to feel stuck, the negative self-talk begins its rant. Do you recognize any of these inner comments? This is terrible. This isn’t what I want to say. I’m going around in circles. I should scrap the project, start over.
Can you write something that’s not so boring?
Just the fact of that self-talk arising tells me that I’m circling around an idea that’s agitating the safety cop inside. It wants to stay safe, unseen, and free from risk. Now my reaction of This is so boring or I’m bored is different. I see it as a sign that I’m ready to break through to something new.
Allison and McEwen offer the antidote my mom didn’t know. Slow down enough to hear what I’m not saying.
Slowing down—how to foster necessary boredom
I was on my walk today, thinking about this idea of slowing down, how impossible it feels right now with the world around us in such high tension, how absolutely necessary it is for sanity. I came up with a little list that you might enjoy having in your back pocket over the week to come. These are ways I’ve found to foster that inner stillness of necessary boredom that allows me to write no matter what.
And that’s what it comes down to, for me at least: to be able to write, to create, to express myself into the world, no matter what that world is feeding back to me at the moment.
So here’s the list. Please add to it, in the comments, if you have ways to foster boredom that work for you.
Check HALT—am I hungry, angry, lonely, or tired? Use the Hanscom technique or another to clear the emotion, feed myself, rest
Fast for an hour from any distractions—no news, no internet, no emails
Read—get dreamy with someone else’s writing
Listen to music
Take a walk, let the mind chatter dissolve into nature
Garden or touch something living, like petting an animal
Exercise
Sleep enough—take a nap if I can
Move from large focus to tiny details—clean a junk drawer or do handwork (knit!)
Make art
What do you do?
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
This week, when you have that sense of boredom, restlessness, lethargy in your creative life, see if you can look beyond it to what the gatekeeper might be preventing. Are you ready to take a creative risk? Do you need to process some rumbling emotion that’s in the way?
Write three concerns you have about your writing, why it’s not satisfying you right now.
Then write three unsolved questions you have about it.
Choose one item on the “fostering boredom” list and try it for an hour, just to see if your mind can still enough to let an idea float in. It might be a clue about what to do next with your writing.