I wish I could be bored

“I’m bored!” Was pretty much the chorus of my childhood… I’m sure my mum got sick of hearing it, but there it was “I’m bored!”

I was a loner though, I didn’t like playing out with the other kids, I wanted to be inside. I didn’t particularly want them at my house all that often either… (there were a few exceptions)

I read books, drew pictures, scribbled in colouring books, made castles out of toilet and kitchen paper tubes, read some more, danced around the room, made up stories, watched a couple of kids shows (if/when they were on) or whatever my family were watching – none of this binge watching hours per day (thanks Netflix!)

Then after a while “I’m bored!”

I can’t remember the last time I complained about being bored… I wish I were bored. I wish I had the chance to be bored.

Being an adult sucks, there’s just no time to be bored anymore.

There’s always something. Something to do, to think about, to sort, to organise, to do…

Now I look back and I cherish those “bored” moments.

Without those bored moments, I wouldn’t have found things to do, I wouldn’t have collected up toilet roll tubes to make castles, or the shiny wrappers from Quality Street chocolates to make pictures.

I wouldn’t have had my friend crawling around in a sleeping bag pretending to be a giant snake trying to capture me (bit weird, but we were small and it was fun)

I wouldn’t have bought a roll of lining paper from the local decorators and stuck it to the wall to use as a giant drawing sheet.

I wouldn’t have imagined worlds different from the one I live in, or walked through wardrobes and fought Ice Queens with Aslan…

I wouldn’t have collected boxes from local shops to make doll houses.

There’s so much I wouldn’t have done had I not been bored.

Even at 16, I found one of my favourite authors through “being bored” and raiding my mums bookshelves, which spurred a whole collection of his works and even more hours spent exploring new worlds.

So yeah, I wish I could be bored more often.

Great things come from being bored.

It’s when your mind has chance to think, explore, tap into other ideas that you can’t think of while you’re busy.

So what am I going to do?

Well… I’m going to make more time to be bored. It sounds like a crazy idea; how do you “make time” to be bored?

Well, you simply put aside some time to switch off from everything else, and you let the boredom take over.

Then you see where it leads…

And speaking from past experience, it’s usually somewhere fun