Member-only story
Boredom is the Creative Tool You’re Too Scared to Use
Or, why you should watch the grass grow
In the long, languid summers of my teenage years, the air buzzed with a single question. What are we going to do?
Where I grew up, none of us spent the summer at sleepaway camp or rushing between music lessons and rock climbing gyms. At best, we would get five or six days at scout camp or a family road trip. But the responsibility for filling up most summer days fell upon our slouched shoulders.
Our parents went to work and left us to fend for ourselves. Those of us with mothers who worked to maintain the home during the day were ushered out before noon and not welcomed back before dinner at the earliest, with the often unspoken understanding that we should only return right before sunset.
Often around three in the afternoon, unbidden, the lyrics of the 1984 Depeche Mode song, Something to Do, would come into my mind:
I’m going crazy with boredom
Come with me
And tell meIs there something to do?
Is there something to do?
Is there something to do?
Is there something to do?
