In Praise of Boredom
Hi friend,
“It’s from boredom that the best ideas spring into being,” my mother used to tell us when we were young. It was true, though “best” may be a bit of a stretch to describe some of the things my brother and I came up with. Sometimes boredom spurred us into wild flights of imagination, like composing and performing a play for our friends and neighbors. Other times, in want of something to do, we dove into pure mischief, like the time we used Swiss army knives to carve our initials into the windowsills all around the house.
But what I do know is that as a young person, I had the opportunity to be bored much more often than I do now. I was regularly enveloped by expansive pockets of stillness and silence, and in those moments, I escaped into imaginatively rich landscapes. I had a closet in my bedroom—it was actually the understairs of the attic—that was the perfect nook, so tiny and dark with no windows. I adorned the walls and ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars, and I’d crawl into it with my comforter and a little light to draw or read or daydream about what I wanted to be when I grew up. It was in that stillness and silence that I first discovered and began to cultivate my interior life.
- Suleika Jaouad
“It’s from boredom that the best ideas spring into being,” my mother used to tell us when we were young. It was true, though “best” may be a bit of a stretch to describe some of the things my brother and I came up with. Sometimes boredom spurred us into wild flights of imagination, like composing and performing a play for our friends and neighbors. Other times, in want of something to do, we dove into pure mischief, like the time we used Swiss army knives to carve our initials into the windowsills all around the house.
But what I do know is that as a young person, I had the opportunity to be bored much more often than I do now. I was regularly enveloped by expansive pockets of stillness and silence, and in those moments, I escaped into imaginatively rich landscapes. I had a closet in my bedroom—it was actually the understairs of the attic—that was the perfect nook, so tiny and dark with no windows. I adorned the walls and ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars, and I’d crawl into it with my comforter and a little light to draw or read or daydream about what I wanted to be when I grew up. It was in that stillness and silence that I first discovered and began to cultivate my interior life.
- Suleika Jaouad
