“You have to let yourself get so bored that your mind has nothing better to do than tell itself a story” - Neil Gaiman
As a child all I heard was, that boredom is a lack of imagination and creativity. My mother said, “Bored? Never let me hear that word from you. You are bored if you’re completely ignorant!” What she meant was that a creative mind can’t be bored because boredom and creativity are opposing states of mind. To my Mum, boredom was the great evil…if you were bored all you had to do was to get off your backside and live life, work and be productive. Growing up we had very little to amuse us, no TV, no gadgets, no access to outside entertainment unless we made it up…so we did, with our hands and our minds…we produced stuffed toys, embroidered napkins, baked cookies, planted a patch in the garden, made up and enacted plays which we subjected our parents to watch over and over again. This is how the long summer vacation was endured and sometimes enjoyed. No matter what Mum felt about it, we’ve all known that restless sensation stirring inside when we can’t find anything fun to do…we have the energy but no outlet. So, grabbing another cookie, buying a new gadget or endlessly scrolling through our social media feed for the 10th time seems the only way to be. As I reflect back, and learned much later, was that when we didn’t have school work, when we didn’t need to concentrate and complete tasks, our minds were free to roam and explore. The cutting off of ‘have to’ stuff was necessary for the birth of unknown landscapes and private stories. It is the mundane, the routine, that frees the mind to access the inaccessible, to remember the forgotten, to ponder over and recollect…we can then move from the limitations of the conscious mind to go beyond itself. My own experience too That is where we enter the realm of potentiality…where possibility exists. So there is value in boring tasks…that engage the body and not the mind. Neil Gaiman says, “ You have to let yourself get so bored that your mind has nothing better to do than to tell itself a story.” Didn’t this get proven during lockdown….I heard of so many short films and scripts that got done, umpteen ways of making sourdough bread, cooking heathy and creative food and much health-related advice was freely floating around. We did all this when we had ‘nothing else to do’ and we were forced to explore creative outlets to fill the gap our brain was experiencing. Boredom is not in itself creative, its what it leads to that’s important. To me, the purpose of boredom is to make us aware of our desire body…it is telling us that we want to do something, but not necessarily what is around us, and that starts the process of searching, seeking….we’re itching to do something to engage the mind. The old dictum “seek and you shall find” relates to boredom too. Boredom actually clears the space and then there’s a good chance to discover something new. Cheers! Until next time… |
Ritu Malhotra |
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