The Regenerative, Endangered Power of Boredom

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.