When I am on travel, I do not check headlines, I do not track the stock market, I don’t check email and I avoid social media like the plague. Why? Because travel, at the moment, is a rare treat and I do not want to miss out on the experience, the immersion and the lessons this town and these people have for me. I don’t want to miss out on feeling the connection to these people and this place and the way it can teach me about myself and my world.
When I travel, I need to cultivate boredom. Sitting in a coffee shop with no phone, I am forced to consider the big questions… or to enjoy an empty mind immersed in the moment… or to be bored, not knowing what will come to me next. Many good articles have been written about how boredom prompts creativity and the need to cultivate boredom for creative purposes. But we also need boredom – quiet time without anything else to occupy our senses – to allow us to consider the bigger questions and more importantly the bigger answers that ultimately forward our development. Sometimes we avoid boredom because we don’t want to face these questions or because we already know the answer and we don’t know how to proceed or we are to scared to proceed.
Headlines, social media feeds, continuous email checks, and the like are a great way to avoid yourself and the reality of your current situation. Like a rat clicking away for a dopamine pellet, we instinctively reach for our phones instead of reaching for our journals, books, guitars, or meditation pillows, or anything even slightly creative or constructive.
Here’s the thing. Shouldn’t every day be seen as rare and not to be missed? We must cultivate space and time to be in the moment, think and be bored. Or at minimum, we need to replace the compulsion to reach for our phones with something else.
- reach for a book
- take a deep breath
- look around you mindfully
- reach for a musical instrument, journal, sketchbook or other creative outlet
- interact with a pet, person or plant
- face the questions and the answers
When I travel, epiphanies come like rain but it is not the travel that makes it happen, it is the boredom. It is the mental space to think and the willingness to face the answers to big questions. The travel helps – being in a new place around new people out of your normal routine – but I could just as easily zone out here on my favorite diet of headlines, social media feeds, and incessant email checks and miss the opportunity to forward my understanding of myself and humanity.
What do you reach for when you are bored? What reality do you need to face? How can you cultivate some time and space TODAY to let it come?
