Parenting literature these days is full of encouragement to let kids be bored. In an over-scheduled world, kids need downtime. Their brains benefit from white space, which ultimately results in greater creativity and motivation.
As a mom of three young children, I can attest to the benefits of boredom (although I can also attest to the messiness of its ensuing blanket forts and slime recipes). My own best memories of childhood are from a season when my siblings and I learned to entertain each other without a home television.
Adults aren’t given the same permission to be bored. Instead, we are encouraged to be productive. We evaluate our worth and usefulness in terms of busyness and efficiency. In our achievement-driven society, any kind of lull is perceived as evidence of poor planning or low ambition. The quiet rage I feel when I am held up in the grocery checkout line—without any more emails to respond to on my smartphone—exposes my pathological aversion to white space.
For me, and for many I’ve pastored, this “efficiency addiction” can often be subdued only by some kind of mind-numbing entertainment. In a discussion about Sabbath-keeping, some friends admitted to me that the only way they know how to disentangle from work is by bingeing Netflix shows. It seems that our consumer-capitalist framework has taught us to know only two modes: productive or entertained.
My Child’s Success Isn’t My Crowning Glory
Many of us are currently riding that pendulum as we leave the constant stimulation of the end-of-year holidays for the fresh to-do lists of New Year’s resolutions. Our fluctuation between overwork and inertia demonstrates that we have forgotten how to exist apart from what we produce or consume.
Of course, productivity is part of our calling as God’s image bearers. Work predates the Fall and will likely last into eternity (Isa. 65:17–25). But we are more than what we do.
God declared creation to be “very good” before human beings did anything to develop it (Gen. 1:31). When my children embrace the natural lulls in activity on a given day, they are usually reconnecting with this good creation. They inspect icicles outside or play in a bubble bath. Sometimes they fall asleep. Their ability to receive the present moment, with all the limitations and pleasures of embodiment, convicts me. It exposes my disinterest with the world beyond my computer screen or to-do list. It exposes my fear of what might be deemed inefficient or insignificant.
I am challenging myself to welcome my own encounters with boredom as a spiritual discipline of sorts. In the spare moments of the day when I would typically turn to my phone for either a quick task or mindless clickbait—waiting in line at the store, sitting at a red light, even walking from the bedroom to the kitchen—I am seeking instead to be present.
This has made my life less productive and at times less interesting. But it is also reorienting me to a way of being in the world that is more expansive than my to-do list. When we resist the urge to fill every moment with a task or bit of amusement, we practice a subtle form of cultural resistance. We remind ourselves and others that life is more than a series of accomplishments and that enjoyment is not synonymous with entertainment.
Getting there, of course, is not easy. Our commitment to preoccupation often stems from deeper anxieties than the day’s deadlines. Busyness can mask low self-esteem, unprocessed grief, fears about the future, and much more. But even these need to be given space to emerge so that we can address them honestly.
I have a friend who is a spiritual director. She encourages people not to overstuff their prayer lives with activity—because even good things like prayer lists can inadvertently feed our preoccupation. Our souls need white space, time to unfurl in God’s presence and be healed. We can’t hustle our way to holiness, Alex Sosler wrote for CT, because “formation is less about productivity and more about stillness.”
This is how boredom can lead to breakthrough in our lives: not as an end in itself but—as its etymology suggests—as a boring through, like a hole that is bored or drilled into a solid object to make space for something else. If we can prayerfully receive it, boredom can create the conditions within us for deeper attunement and presence.
When we embrace white space, moments or even hours of inefficient, uninteresting time, we begin to reconnect with the basic truths of our existence in the world. We discover parts of ourselves that predate our productivity and will outlast the next episode on Netflix. When we practice the skill of presence, we retrain our senses to see the goodness of creation as it is right now and we increase our capacity to enjoy it.
You Can’t Hustle Your Way to Holiness
Ultimately, strengthening our attunement to creation can serve another end: wonder. As I’ve practiced slowing down and paying attention to the present moment, I’ve realized that just because I’ve seen that icicle or the sunset for 36 years doesn’t mean I’ve exhausted their beauty or meaning.
Sometimes, after we’ve inoculated ourselves to the world’s gifts, we need to force ourselves to look again until we remember how to see. This too is a kind of attunement to God, who is always affirming creation by holding it together (Col. 1:17). When we learn to value presence over productivity, we grow into his image and rediscover the wonder for which we were made.
In Orthodoxy, theologian G. K. Chesterton put it this way:
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
The inevitable winter lull, with its long stretches of routine and inclement weather, can lead to more frustration and determination to get things done. But if we let it, these months’ slower pace can reorient us to the gift of being, apart from questions of usefulness and productivity. We can choose to embrace these unavoidable inefficiencies—and the boredom they may evoke—as a kind of spiritual discipline that reconnects us to our true selves and to God.
As we become attuned to the people and things in front of us, we live counter-culturally, reflecting the image of the God who said in the beginning, “Let there be,” and it was good.
Hannah Miller King is the associate rector at The Vine Anglican Church in Western North Carolina and the author of Feasting on Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness.
