The Regenerative, Endangered Power of Boredom

woman wearing red sweater lying on snow covered ground

Boredom is a dying art.

One thing I’ve gleaned from this pandemic is the necessity and power of leaving room for boredom. I was reminded of this as I checked the school closing lists on our local television station’s website this morning. Even snow days aren’t sacred any more –about half of the “No School Today” notices posted included a second line: “e-learning day today.” Even our kids are compelled to work from home (beyond the generational curse known as homework, that is). Whatever happened to snow days that meant snow angels and sledding and sleeping in?

We’ve forgotten how to stand in line or sit in a waiting room and just …be. It seems people have forgotten how to take those in-between moments and stare into space. Give us thirty unoccupied seconds, and we reflexively reach for our phones. Even meditation –the ultimate modern example of “productive boredom”– is something we search for on our Headspace app and not in the very real space around ourselves, beyond our phones.

Like many others, I brought my classroom home with me in March when the world shuttered and hunkered down against the Covid-19 virus. My husband’s been working at home since March as well, and likely will be for at least the next few months. It’s been much harder on him than on me, to be honest. He’s the extrovert, I’m the introvert. That said, it’s really been a tough year for all of us, as our daughter came home from college, our son who is in high school a half-hour north of where we live started doing his classes online, and my other daughter who’s done her studying from home for all of her high school experience has needed to adjust to a house full of familial distractions. Now, we get along quite well as families go. We’re not yellers, and conflicts are usually held to a simmer when they happen, but in a relatively small house, finding our own space is still a challenge.

And not only finding is physical space tough, but temporal space is hard to find as well. By late April, I learned to keep work hours, to build a daily routine that allowed me to save those evening hours for non-work endeavors. Even with that though, I’ve done very little writing since March. Part of that’s the post-graduate-school, adjusting-to-work-life lull, but part of it’s just craving the empty space of not being obligated to do anything. Margin. The ability to take an hour to aimlessly research things like local hiking spots or the relative futility of modern weight-loss methods or how to build a capsule wardrobe. Reading a book just because it looks interesting and not because it’s something I should be reading –and the guilty pleasure of not writing something I really don’t care about that much simply because it’s been nearly a year since I’ve had anything published.

I’ve become suspicious of the creeping dread of obligation in defense of deliberately reclaiming some empty space in my day. I’ve learned to find the place in the day where my work day fits, and to not let it go further. Since my second semester teaching, I’ve added a note on page one of my syllabi outlining my “email hours.” I explain to my students that if they email me before 7am or after 11pm or any time on a Sunday, they shouldn’t expect a response right away. It’s a reasonable, common-sense boundary, but even putting that in writing has helped remind me that working from home doesn’t necessarily mean 24/7 availability. I dumped social media apps from my iPhone long ago, but two months ago, I finally deleted my Outlook and Gmail apps from my phone. I highly recommend the practice.

So, what am I getting at? I hope that we’ll all let this pandemic work-from-home revolution (if we want to call it that) become an opportunity to revisit the importance of boredom. I hope that we’ll learn that setting hours and boundaries is an essential practice while working from home, but also quite possible when we all move back into offices away from home.

Maybe we’ll learn to turn off all those blasted notifications on our phones. Maybe we’ll try a digital Sabbath once in a while. Maybe we’ll go on a long walk and leave the phone and earbuds at home. Maybe we’ll unplug the internet router for a day and see if our family can survive the experience (confession: I haven’t yet had the courage to try that yet). If we relearn how to be bored (perhaps starting by learning to stand in line and look around ourselves instead into our phones), perhaps we’ll all come back to work –whether that be home or office– refreshed, regenerated, and reminded of the reasons why we go to work in the first place.

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What’s Going On: 2020 Playlist

black vinyl player

I grew up in the times of “boom boxes,” “ghetto blasters,” and cassette tapes. 8-tracks are at the far edge of my memory, from my grandparents collection of Marty Robbins and Conway Twitty in the basement by the stereo cabinet to a Carpenters 8-track that I vaguely (and possibly incorrectly) recall our car at one point.

So, it’s a wonderful thing to have access to more music than I could possibly listen to via the internet. Our Spotify subscription has become as much a necessary monthly expense as groceries -and that’s only a small exaggeration. The kids have their own usernames on our family account now. I drew the line after the fourteenth playlist of Parry Gripp tunes invaded my carefully curated commute playlists. …Click that link at your own risk, by the way.

If you need a soundtrack to “These Unusual Times” that isn’t the drone of CNN or Fox News in the background (NPR at our house – no cable), I humbly suggest Marvin Gaye’s classic, What’s Going On, from 1971. Amazing how something made that long ago speaks so accurately to current events.

Seriously prophetic stuff. And I mean that in the definition of prophecy not as future-telling, but as something designed to move a a person to action.

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Coronavirus Diaries: Easter Sunday, 2020

He is risen, the robin sings.

Her song declares the truth of resurrection,

notes carried through the snow-laden wind.

 

A late, April, Easter morning

sheltered together and apart against the virus

we hear the same revelation

and await the emergence

from so many kinds of tombs.

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Sunday Morning: Coronavirus Diaries, 3/22/20

2020, so far, has not been kind to me. At the end of January, I fell down most of a flight of stairs on my way to my office where I teach, my journey ending in a mild concussion and a badly broken wrist. On the 31st, I had surgery to repair my wrist, and only now am I getting back to two-handed typing, handwriting, and –just in time to arm myself against anxiety caused by the recent global pandemic– knitting. And now, we’re stuck at home as I’m trying to write in the corner of my bedroom, wondering how Virginia Woolf would’ve fared under the circumstances, when the “room of my own” is routinely invaded by my kids wanting to flop on the bed and tell me they’re bored.

But today, I’m sitting at home on a Sunday morning, all of us together –my college daughter included. I’m writing while they make homemade donuts that we’ll enjoy while we’re watching the video of our church service. It could be worse. Much worse. Here we are, together, all of us relatively able to live together in fairly close quarters without becoming dangerous to each other. We have enough toilet paper, an online calculator tells me, for another eighteen days, and enough food in the pantry to feed us for over a week, if we’re a little creative once the cheese is gone. Because it’s always the cheese that goes first, of course, and cheese is literally and figuratively the stuff that holds together about 90% of our family’s favorite recipes. May God help us if any of us ever becomes lactose intolerant.

As educators, my husband and I are also blessed with jobs that translate fairly well to being done online, at home. Of course, he’s taught online for over ten years, so he’s the resident expert. I, in my first year of teaching, am still figuring everything out, and now that includes the intricacies of Canvas and Zoom and Microsoft Teams in addition to general pedagogy and how to keep a mid-day core level English Comp class engaged enough to not fall asleep during a fifteen minute lecture (still working on that one). Still, I figure, I’m only teaching one section this semester, and I have my two hour commute time back, so I have plenty of time to figure all this out. We’ll see how Tuesday goes. At any rate, we’re feeling pretty blessed in this little house this morning, especially since my son, who got the hazmat-lite treatment earlier this week at the clinic, tested positive for Influenza B and not Coronavirus. He’s mostly back to full functioning, just in time for his school to start e-learning next week. So, the count at our house is two teachers doing their teaching jobs online from home (one high school, one college), one temporarily online college student, one temporarily e-learning high school student, and one high schooler who normally does her schoolwork online. It’s going to be interesting around here next week.

So, a quiet Sunday, nowhere to go, a book or two to read, and my work is set out for me tomorrow. If it warms up, I might venture out for a walk, since they say that’s allowable, given sufficient distance from anyone I might run into outside with the same idea. For now, I think my coffee is done, so I’ll go pour myself a cup and enjoy one of my daughter’s homemade donuts while we figure out whether we can put a facebook livestream recording onto our TV. It can’t be any more difficult than setting up a Zoom meeting, can it?

 

*photo: view from our front yard, September 2016

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