The Blessing of Boredom

When I was a kid, I spent the better part of the school year yearning for summer to come back around. This usually happened around the second week in September. When that last bell rang and we were unleashed on the suburbs, I felt pure freedom.

Yet, around the second week of summer, that freedom was usually coupled with pure boredom. This was heightened by the fact that television was strictly rationed in my house and I didn't have Nintendo. At the time, I resented the fact that EVERYBODY else got to watch the Simpsons and B-horror-films and play Duck Hunt, but from where I sit now, I thank God for that boredom.

While I was suffering, I learned to entertain myself. Little did I know it, but I was getting some hardcore basic training for my creativity. After I had spent my excessive ADHD energy playing outside or swimming at the pool, My mom would take me to the library and I would take out dozens of books. I murdered reading lists, and devoured as many mystery and fantasy novels I could get my hands on. Nancy Drew, Harriet the Spy, a Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the Martian Chronicles, A Prayer for Own Meany. Books that involved people and places light-years from my own existence, or kids just like me that got the chance to leave suburbia and go on an extraordinary adventure.

Even though I didn't have movies or TV or video games to watch visually, reading allowed my imagination to create its cinematic experience inside my mind. Being read to aloud was even better because my eyes didn't have to do any work and my mind was free to fly.

It was in these moments that my skills as both a writer and an actress were being carved. I lived vicariously through every character in those books. I saw different worlds and different times through their eyes, learned their motivations and points of views, and understood on a deep level people who were sometimes vastly different than myself. Now when I have to create characters that are different from me, I can just go back into the stores of people in my memory and pull up those vicarious experiences to use as the core of my existence.

I recently watched an interview with British Director Edgar Wright, who directed Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Wright discussed his unique perspective when he said, "growing up in Somerset, England, while it was very idyllic and rural and beautiful, it was also very boring. Being a fantasizing teenager, I would frequently stare out the window and imagine all sorts of car chases and explosives." Now he is making millions of dollars creating all of those scenes that were rooted in these daydreams he had when he probably thought he was dying of boredom.

I was working on a shoot yesterday. It was a political rally and I was a political aide listening to a politician make a speech. It was all extemporaneous speaking, so we never knew what was coming, and at one point while outlining his imaginary platform, Mr. Cheesy Politician announced that he would be instigating a year-round school year. No more summer.

I was supposed to be a sycophant to this man, and it required ALL of my acting chops not to speak out in opposition to this blasphemy. School is important for some things. In an ideal world, school is a small microcosm of our society and it socializes us. We learn to play well with others in an organized setting. We learn to respect authority. We learn tools to help us navigate the world. We learn the story of our world, so we can understand where we come from so we know where we're headed. We make life-long friendships. We learn how to handle mean girls and bullies. We learn about things like sex and drugs from our peers instead of our parents. I could go on about the value of school, despite my own love/hate relationship with the academic system.

However, for creative people, in most cases, school is a place where our imagination is caged. We must stay at our desks and pay attention, even after the point has been made and received, when our brains really want to travel to distant lands and dream up characters or our bodies need to dance and move or our voices need to sing or our hands need to tinker with old computer parts.

Some of the names that will go down in history as the greatest innovators of our time: Einstein, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan, the Beatles, even Mark Zuckerberg...these people didn't make their contributions as part of a school project. They made them by having the quiet moments to hear the inspiration and then the time to follow the spark.

The more school there is, the more standardized it becomes, the less freedom the creativity has to exercise its muscles. It doesn't help that schools across the country are cutting the arts out of the curriculum altogether. This could have vast societal consequences: less innovation, a stagnation in the arts, and a rise in reality TV.

Don't get me wrong, I love movies. LOVE them. And, as for T.V., I watch Modern Family religiously. I can even get into video games. But, if I had never had those long stretches of boredom in my youth without every moment being filled with external sensory stimulation, I may never even have realized what my mind was capable of.

Thankfully, now that I'm an adult, at least in terms of my age, I've come to realize that boredom is just alerting us to the gift of nothing to do but dream.