Is Boredom the Gateway to Creativity?

by Joan Friedlander

We say we want balance and the ability to have more free time, but when outward demands slow down a bit it seems to create a state of imbalance instead. I recently found myself dealing with this unusual predicament and noticed the same "problem" for two of my clients. The things we'd been working through were suddenly resolved and we hit a weird wall. We didn't know what to do next or what, exactly, to focus on. It made me wonder.

• Is it possible that the absence of drama or urgency causes confusion and anxiety?
• Are we so used to fixing problems that we don't know how to deal with their sudden absence?

When one client said, "I do much better when I've got a lot on my plate - it helps me stay focused," I let her comment go by without challenging it as I might normally do. Is she really just saying what all of us feel? If so, how can we ever expect to have more space in our lives to create that we desire?

I wonder if we tend to stay busy and take on more than we can handle because having "nothing to do" is scary. With nothing to react to we have to turn to ourselves for inspiration. With nothing to fix, figure out or juggle we're faced with the opportunity to build and create, and it's uncomfortable! It's much harder to create from "nothing" than to react to something.

It reminds me of children. They sit across from you, slumped in their chair, and the worst has happened. "I'm bored," they whine. "There's nothing to do!" They're desperate because suddenly life has come to a screeching halt and they're freaked out. They look at you beseechingly, practically blaming you for their plight, demanding you take the boredom away. And, so, like the good parents you are you do what you can to distract them, to take the pain away. And the cycle begins again.

Perhaps we're more like our children than we'd like to believe. It seems that we, like them, rely on outside stimulus to keep us engaged. With the sudden loss of urgency we panic.

I've noticed that the very boredom we dread is also the pathway to creativity IF we can just hang in there long enough to allow our inspiration to bubble up and carry us forward. It takes more initiative to create personal productivity than to react to outward demands, to go with the flow if you will.

The difficulty seems to be in the gap, the one between urgency and inspiration. We have been so completely trained to be continually productive that we've got no tolerance for those times when we do have less on our plate, when we're not feeling the tug and pull of external demands or internal anxiety. Looking back to my own experience last week, I recall feeling:

Unproductive - horrors!
Listless - what should I do first?
Scattered - I had just enough freedom to lose my apparent focus
Even a little depressed - I think this was related to my feeling unproductive

You know what they say; wherever you go there you are. It's like that in the silence. It's not easy to be with these kinds of feelings and it can be quite tempting to seek relief through busyness and distractions.

We each have to find our own way through this one, to find peace in the silence. It may be especially important if silence is the home of innovation and creativity.

 

by Joan Friedlander, © 2006. All rights reserved.