In your busy day, do you make time for boredom?
I remember days that stretched on forever as a child, where I felt I ran out of things to do and lay on the floor staring at the ceiling, tracing patterns in the paintwork with my eyes and feeling like time would never end.
Those days, I daydreamed about so much, and I played make-believe with so many ideas my current writer self would envy.
I wondered how I had so much creativity back then, and it was only in reading advice to embrace boredom—to even create time for boredom—that I realised perhaps this was it.
One evening, instead of meditating (my mind was too chattery), I lay on my floor like a star and stared up at my ceiling.
I traced the cracks in the paintwork with my eyes, and looked at the different patches of white.
I let my mind wander as I stared, and I let the emptiness of the moment take over.
Embracing boredom.
If anyone ever told me lying on my floor and staring at the ceiling would be of benefit to me, I’d have raised a brow and stared at them as if they were odd.
But really, it was brilliant.
My mind chattered itself out.
Ideas returned.
My inner dialogue mulled over many things, including ideas for books, blogs, work I could be doing for my coaching.
People I wanted to speak with. Interviews I wanted to hold.
It reminds me of the advice Neil Gaiman shared in an interview with Tim Ferriss, about how his routine was to sit at his desk. He’d either stare at the wall, or he’d write.
“You don’t have to write. You have permission to not write, but you don’t have permission to do anything else.”—Neil Gaiman
He said at some point it got boring staring at the wall and so he’d end up writing.
“You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.”—Neil Gaiman
But do you give yourself that time to daydream, to be bored, to let ideas flow?
This is your sign. Your permission slip.
It’s not wasting time to embrace boredom.
To stare at the ceiling or the wall. Or lie on the grass and stare at the sky as the clouds scud past?
You don’t need to have a grand plan to create ideas and enhance your writing.
You just need to give yourself permission to be bored, and let your mind chatter away to itself.
And if an idea hits, let it keep running away with itself.
Perhaps keep a pen and paper beside you, just in case!
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