In a recent puja, during a short period of meditation, one of our youngest children piped up, ‘I’m bored’. How many times have we, as parents or adults, heard ‘This is boring’ or ‘I’m bored’? And what do we say in response to this? Busy adults are rarely bored and, as we know, this does not mean that we are calm. For me, it means that I am very busy and, if not, I am often distracting myself.
Somewhat unusually perhaps, I find boredom interesting and, as a result, I want to encourage my daughter to hold that view, even though I understand that she finds boredom uncomfortable. Boredom has an edge to it. It demands a response; the mind wants to be entertained and energised. There is too much space; we need to fill it. There is nothing happening; we need to do something. It is too quiet; something must be wrong.
I encourage myself and my daughter to stay with the boredom for some time. What I often find is that the boredom shifts into something more satisfying than I expected. A creative idea emerges. Happiness can arise. I have noticed this particularly when I might seek to distract myself from the boredom by looking at Facebook or watching something. Yet, as I bounce painfully from distraction to boredom and back, I don’t seem to be touching anything deeper within myself. I seem to be getting further away from ‘my centre’.
I think we can learn a lot by observing how we oscillate between distraction (entertainment) and boredom. Why do we get distracted, or use distraction? What are we running away from that is so terrible that we find it difficult to stay with?
Perhaps our hope is that if we keep all this distractedness going, we will not have to look at who we are, we will not have to feel what we feel, we will not have to see what we see. Putting space into our lives can be an unmasking process; a scary process of facing hard facts.
The more I have looked into my own (worrying) habits of distraction, the more I frame these habits of distraction as addictive. In other words, the more I distract myself with reading online, for instance, the less I am able to tolerate my essential aloneness and quietude. It becomes really difficult to keep myself company! I am caught in a loop which I can get out of by disciplining, or convincing myself, not to distract myself in the face of what seems like boredom.
This bravery to get closer to myself is something that is really important to teach our children, in my opinion. It is essential for children to gain an understanding of themselves around this cycle, in order to become confident in themselves. I am thinking particularly of the pressures for our young people around social media and gaming.
In all classes in our school, we are teaching both mindfulness techniques and Building Learning Power (BLP). In BLP, there is a process of staying with an uncomfortable feeling, (staying in the ‘pit’ of learning) which builds confidence in independent learning. Staying in the ‘pit’ time and time again teaches children the habit of staying with difficulty and so builds a capacity to take risks in learning, to not fear failure so much and, paradoxically, not to fail as much.
It is my fervent wish that both of these approaches to learning help our children to navigate their way successfully through distraction and boredom to a confident and empowered adulthood.