When I was little, my family and I used to live in this small community where most of our neighbors were old people. It was nice the calm that you could find in that place, but at the same time, there wasn’t much to do. With no kids around, it was common for me to stay indoors playing at my room, watching TV, or annoying my parents. And being honest, the fun used to last for the first three hours. After that, everything came down to being bored. Of course, the five-year-old version of me didn’t appreciate it at the time. But now that I’ve grown up (hardly), I can see how important was for me as a person all those moments that I spent in the house doing nothing. Because now I can see how important is for everyone to get bored.
This might sound strange, but it’s the truth.
Every single time my mom would find me doing nothing, she would get mad at me because I was “wasting my time”. And because she is a mom, she would send me to do home chores. “If you have time to sit there and look at the wall, then you have time to clean the dishes”. I have tried to correct her over the years, to tell her that what she’s teaching me is wrong. But you know… Moms. They always find a way to be right (even when they’re not) and make you seem like you are wrong (even when you are not).
So back to the “doing nothing/wasting time” topic. As for how I see it, we never waste our time. We spend it. We watch movies, we hang out with friends, we have dinner at home with family, we read, etc. And between all that, we also do nothing. Yes, is a different way of investing time, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Actually, is the complete opposite of it.
Picture this. The year was 1990. A really young J. K. Rowling was traveling by train from Manchester to London. The convoy had a delay of four hours and she hadn’t brought anything to read. So for four long hours, all she could do was look through the window while hearing annoyed passengers all around her. Of course, there was no fun in that. So, with no more source of entertainment that her mind, she worked with what she had. And do you know what happened next? It came to her. A story of a little kid who receives an invitation letter from a magic school called Howards. Obviously, she didn’t though on the entire plot of Harry Potter in that moment, but it was when the first spark of the story appeared. And all because she found herself bored inside that train.
It comes with human nature the necessity of move, of doing something that will keep us active. And when we don’t have phones around us, or music, or Netflix, we can only rely on our minds and imagination to do the job. Creativity is a value that is getting lost in our times, not because we don’t acknowledge the importance it has, but because we can’t find a way of fitting it in our routine. There’s always something in our minds. The paper we have to write for the next week, or the model we have to finish for tomorrow. And in the small lapses we have, while we are on the subway or waiting for the bus, we take our phones out of our pockets so we can chat with the people we just said “goodbye” to. Because, after a long and exhausting day, we don’t want to think anymore. We want to relax for a few minutes before the routine starts all over again the next morning. And I’m not saying it’s wrong, but it’s not right either.
If we keep losing our capability of thinking, of creating, we’ll lose what separates us from being animals. We’ll be lost from ourselves.
So, the next time you are at the bus stop, or on the subway, unplug yourself from your phone or your homework. You won’t come up with the story of your life in that time… Or maybe you will! You never know. All we can take for sure is that being bored is one of the best things that can happen to us. One of the things we must let happen to us.
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