I’ve been stewing on a post about the importance of unscheduled time and boredom since school got out, a month in which we’ve been mostly either at home together or off on family trips. Finally, here goes!
Because of our co-parenting schedule and unconventional work schedules, my daughter’s dad and I don’t need summer childcare. This summer, we had enough adventures planned that I didn’t sign our kid up for any camps. So her summer is adventures mixed with unstructured days at home. I know this isn’t the right summer for everyone or every year, but I’m a big fan. More specifically, I believe really strongly that unstructured time is important for humans. Boredom is important for humans.
As I put it in a long ago essay on the old Frog Hollow blog:
In Defense of Boredom
It’s important to have unstructured time. It’s important to have time to daydream, to wander, to tinker, to putz.
It’s important to get bored.
That’s right. Bored. As I understand it, boredom is a necessary blankness that makes space for truly awesome ideas.
“Only boring people get bored,” my mom used to say when we were whining about having nothing to do and begging to watch something. Then, “If you’re really bored, why don’t you clean the refrigerator?” We’d figure out something to do real fast.
The ideas that came out of my childhood boredom weren’t boring, and I’m sure your children’s aren’t either. We trained our chickens to stand on our heads, earned our way to Wild Waves by playing Suzuki songs on the Birke Gilman trail, and strung a tin-can telephone from one tree fort to another around two sides of our house (it never worked, of course, but the can may still be in one tree). I made my own bow and arrows, sat on our grape trellis and burned pirate treasure maps with a candle (safely, somehow), invented a language no one now speaks (or ever spoke), and tried to make things grow in the paint-chip invested no man’s land between our house and the neighbor’s driveway.
I could reminisce about all of this for a long time and I will spare you, but that’s partly the point: these are bright memories, and they all came out of boredom.
Sitting out boredom is also great practice in sitting out anxiety, fear, uncertainty, and every other uncomfortable thing life shoves at us. If we learn how to go through boredom without anyone fixing it for us, we’re that much better equipped to sit out the rest of it without reaching for screens or drugs or work or alcohol.
And there’s more — just like land, people need fallow times. We need the time to compost our experiences. Every moment does not bear fruit. Gary Snyder says it well in his poem “On Top”:
All this new stuff goes on top
turn it over, turn it over
wait and water down
from the dark bottom
turn it inside out
let it spread through
Sift down even.
Watch it sprout.A mind like compost.
In the 11 years since I wrote that, we’ve culturally become even less comfortable sitting in the nothingness. Me definitely included. See The Anxious Generation etc. And I think it’s therefore even more important to elbow out unstructured time — and to not fill that time with entertainment.
Thinking about boredom
The grammar of the verb “to bore” is interesting. It isn’t something we do to ourselves, but something done to us, or by us to others. “I am bored.” or “The grammatical nerdiness in my essay bores you.” Jay Griffiths writes about this in the book, A Country Called Childhood, which I don’t own so can’t quote from, but as I remember (because this book made a big impact on me), her gist is that humans are bored by outside factors: boredom is the result of not being free to follow the curiosity and creativity inherent in being human. So we can be bored in a classroom or a waiting room, a place we might leave if all else were equal.
Her point is, left to our own devices, we don’t stay bored. And when I say it is important to be bored, it’s really what happens next that I value. I don’t want everyone stuck in gray blank rooms. I want people — kids, but myself too — to stop being entertained and busy long enough to dive down to the good stuff.
.
OK, but how is it actually going?
Starting the Saturday after my daughter’s school got out, we had four unscheduled days in a row. I had some work to do at home, but no big plans that involved her. I watched her unfurl into summer over those days. She spent hours working on a whiteboard sign for a lemonade stand. She squeezed lemons, made lemonade, and sold it. She set the sprinkler up. She wandered around doing who knows what projects, the Bunnicula audiobooks on repeat. Since then, she has continued on in a pretty unending stream of creativity:
she’s opened a fruit ice cube company called The Frozen Rodent, and spends lots of time making and consuming fruity ice cubes.
she made a poison potion in her tree house that may or may not have involved urine. (Thanks, Shawn, for the childhood story inspiration.)
she is making a passport for her Flat Stanley doll from school, by tracing all the states in her 50 states puzzle onto graph paper.
she has moved bubbles from one container to another for mysterious and unexplained reasons.
she’s whittled, swung, needle-felted, drawn, read, Lego’ed, biked, swum, written, played with pets, and laid out on the lawn chair waiting for her nails to dry.
she has made herself many snacks and eaten them happily.
she has flown doll parachutes out of windows, then revised them and tested them again.
So a pretty good summer, I was all set to say.
Then, yesterday
Then yesterday, she turned down my big dreamy plans of going swimming in the Sound and playing on the beach, in favor of working on a Lego Squinchy dog in her room while listening to Bunnicula for the 8,000th time.
Then she tried to get me to eat a bowl of her “extra” ice cream that turned out to be regurgitated.
It was very hot, and going to the beach had been my happy plan, and we both melted down into crankiness and rudeness. Do they have any camps that start tomorrow? I thought. This whole unstructured time thing is going south.
In the end, we found a swimming compromise, and now she’s at her dad’s, and I’m home with an unstructured cross-things-off-the-list kind of day, wrestling with my own discomfort in that lack of structure, while also turning down social plans to defend it. All of which is to say, I can wax poetical, but open time still gets uncomfortable and at the same time feels critically important. Especially as an artist. But also as a human trying to just have a happy brain.
One of my values is what the poet Keats called Negative Capability, an idea that echoes lots of other human wisdom, but being a poet, I’ll use his words. Negative Capability means being “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It’s the opposite of reaching for the smart phone when a question arises in conversation. It’s the opposite of being overscheduled, externally and internally. And it’s so essential.
So I wish the kids in your life have a summer full of open spaces they learn to sit in without irritable reaching. May we all be so lucky.
Thank you for this great morning read. I loved peaking into the window of your early summer days with Alice. How wonderful that you are both living days and embodying time in this way. I may be a compulsive hiker - going solo - able to be there for the encounters with the territorial owls many mornings. Are we always creating conditions for something as we age? If so, every moment may matter more than we can know. I love the pictures of you as a child - and then your descriptions of Alice as a child. They enrich "playing" with precious imagination as well as discovery, embodiment, learning and probably more. Hugs to you both.