Apr 08
Apr 08
I was once told on a long airplane journey by a colleague that it pays to be patient and it pays to be bored. According to this colleague, he was convinced that for him, creativity lived in moments of boredom.
He told me that the best thing to do when feeling bored is to live with the feeling and take some effort in examining it. His idea was that when you start to be aware of what you end up doing when you push you body & mind further into boredom could help you figure out what you could do to get out of a problem where you felt like there was ‘nothing to do’.
He also pointed out that when you first do this exercise you end up charting your obvious routine ways out of boredom but if you stick with the feeling, you’ll start to push your mind into being more … creative.
Try it on a long plane journey - sit down and be bored. If you can be patient, bored and pay detailed attention to what happens, you might find some new ways of being creative.
It has certainly made me appreciate boredom more.
In contrast to your plane exercise, I actually practice the opposite. As a big talker (or so my husband tells me) I like to converse at regular intervals about everything & anything. For those topics of conversation which are not urgent or topical, but feel important enough to warrant time & attention, my husband will often say “Put it on the plane list”. You see, we have a list of conversation topics which we want to explore in discussion when we have time & headspace and the plane is the perfect vehicle for such conversation! What you may ask? Well, there is inevitably a list of questions which pop into my mind as I go about my daily business . . Do I think there’s enough grace in the world? Where is the line between being content & settling & how do you know when you’ve crossed it? Can you choose to be content rather than achieve it? And so for us, time spent millions of miles in the air as we travel from one place to another is often spent deep in discussion about life, the universe & everything, but because we’re removed from our daily grind, we tend to think & articulate ourselves differently which is refreshing. Anyway, try it on a long journey yourself, think back to your university days when you had all the time in the world to sit in coffee shops & debate philosophical questions. It’s sometimes nice to play at that again and just let your mind wander with a small map, unrestricted by time, deadlines or business problems that need to be solved.