What I want for my children are the things boredom brings out of people.
What I want for my children are the things boredom brings out of people.
W hen he was six years old, C. S. Lewis moved to Little Lea, an expansive house that his father had built on the outskirts of Belfast. In that same year, his only brother Warnie left for boarding school in England. “Jack” Lewis lived as if he were an only child in Little Lea, often cabined hiding from the Ulster rain. It was this that drove him to read deeply in his father’s books and illustrate stories about a place he called Animal-Land, where mice were knights who rode out to fight cats. This house had a large oaken wardrobe, made by his grandfather, and which is now preserved at Wheaton College — as a kind of evangelical literary relic.
Many readers will have already noticed (or already known) that the Chronicles of Narnia also begin with siblings exploring a rambling house on a rainy day that left them bored. The beloved children’s book series has been adapted to film several times and will receive yet another adaptation, with an improbably progressive rock soundtrack, directed by Greta Gerwig.
I’m now strangely thankful for all the boredom I experienced in the first two and half decades of my life, before smartphones. And like many people who too often find themselves mindlessly scrolling, I’m nostalgic for it. If a time traveler could visit me in my childhood — only child, with a working mother and a grandmother watching me — they’d find me occasionally watching television or playing video games. But for hours and hours, I would simply explore the world through the atlases my grandfather kept. When my mother got a CD player, I would pretend to conduct Tchaikovsky. I would put up a little plastic basketball hoop on the door of my bedroom and compete against myself in imagined dunk contests.
Boredom extended even into my working life. During my college years, I spent time working in a chemical factory in Danbury, Conn. I was trusted with the repetitive job of processing ammonium formate. Pulling out frozen barrels of it onto the floor, hoisting them up in a chained contraption, beating them out of the drums with a sledgehammer, then feeding the chunks into a centrifuge, spinning it — and then packing, weighing, and labeling it. Four batches of two barrels in the morning. Then lunch break. Then four more batches of two barrels in the afternoon. It was basically an all-brawn, no-brain task after the first two days. I found my mind taking flight, writing poetry, inventing stories, and ultimately daydreaming myself into the firm ambition to do something other than hit barrels with a sledgehammer for my paycheck.
Now, for my children, I find myself scheming to create boredom, which is harder than it seems. My mother just had to live her life, and maybe the rain had to start, and I would have to “occupy” myself with something — those atlases, or history books, or classical music CDs. When I’d really get bored, I would design crude Rube Goldberg devices out of blankets, or toys, or pots and pans. When I was very young, I would take a variety of beauty products out of the bathroom cabinets, bring them into the yard, and create “potions.” Apparently I was yearning for the chemical plant at an early age.
There was broadcast media available in my house around the clock, but 90 percent of the time, it had nothing to offer children. That’s no longer true. Now the very form our television takes — a connected device with streaming media — means that there are huge libraries of content that children can watch at any time. My kids’ peers have connected devices.
Strangely, it is actually by filling their days with activities that we find ways to make them bored: time waiting between dance rehearsals or driving to travel baseball games.
I suppose it’s not even boredom itself that I’m aiming at. Boredom is merely a means to a higher end. What I want for my children are the things boredom brings out of people. First, and most important, the ability to simply develop a real interior life. Contentment and even joy in life are, in my experience, only cultivated to their heights by allowing your own thoughts to occasionally accuse you or discomfit you in some way. I’m always worried for people who need constant distraction, as if they are running away from an internal voice. Secondly, I want my children’s own creativity to have room to express itself. Just as C. S. Lewis discovered the beginnings of Narnia in childhood, so I want my children to cultivate passions and take on projects they’ve assigned to themselves. And lastly, there is a kind of excellence that can only be found by plugging away at something to the point of boredom with it, and then going through it. One of my sons, thankfully, quickly tires of digital distraction — and sends himself out into the yard, kicking the soccer ball around, dribbling it through the fallen leaves, and pounding it against the walls of the house, over and over and over again. He’s not just developing his skills as an athlete, but dwelling with himself in relative silence. I can’t exactly trace the causation, but I believe the interior life he is developing in these hours has allowed the simple things we’ve taught him about the world or his faith to take root and develop into searching questions. He’s more witty, insightful, socially adept, and even subtle. He has more to say than just the weird memetic yelping that is now so common among YouTube-addled peers. Through boredom, he has become more himself.
Ultimately, boredom extinguishes itself, by allowing our passions to grow and allowing us to become interested in things outside of us, and thereby to become interesting to others. Boredom grants us a certain facility with solitude, and that, in turn, makes us good company.