“I’m bored” used to work on me like a fire alarm. The moment one of my kids said it, I would leap up and start offering solutions. A craft. A snack. An outing. A carefully curated activity involving pipe cleaners. Boredom felt like a problem, and problems are for solving, and solving things is my love language.
Then came the second Wednesday of the school holidays.
It was raining. Nothing was planned. All three kids declared bankruptcy of the soul by ten in the morning, and instead of fixing it I did something radical, by which I mean nothing. I said, “that sounds hard,” and kept folding washing.
Boredom is the pause where
imagination clears its throat.
{Tweet that.}
The complaining got worse before it got better. I want to be truthful about that. There was flopping on furniture. There were heavy sighs from the doorway, performed at volume, for an audience. The youngest lay on the floorboards like a murder victim for a while.
And then, maybe forty minutes in, the house went quiet, and I found them at the kitchen table. The coloring books had come off the shelf. Nobody had suggested it. My oldest was working on the ferry page and telling the others a story about the ferry that was, as far as I know, ninety percent invented. The murder victim was on her third purple dog. They stayed there past lunch.
I’ve thought about that Wednesday a lot since. Every interesting thing my kids did those holidays came out of an empty stretch I refused to fill. The cubby made of couch cushions. The theatrical production with a run time, mercifully, of four minutes. The coloring table sessions that turned into story-telling sessions. All of it grew in the gaps.
Kids need a bit of nothing. It is the run-up before the jump. When every hour is scheduled and every silence has a screen in it, the run-up disappears, and so does the jump. The hard part is that the nothing looks like failure for the first forty minutes, and someone has to hold their nerve, and that someone is unfortunately the parent.
I still plan plenty. Old habits. But I guard the empty Wednesdays now, and I keep the shelf stocked for whatever the boredom turns into. Around here it usually turns into pencils.
We started Outline Origins because we think childhood needs more slow afternoons. A coloring book of your family’s own memories is a good thing to leave lying around for the next rainy Wednesday. The boredom will do the rest.
