Time to get bored

We desperately need it

The Premise

When was the last time you were bored? I don’t mean bored as in flipping through Netflix wondering which series to surrender your brain to next, I mean truly bored, looking out the window bored, away from your phone bored, no scrolling, no screens, nothing but you and your mind?

I bet you can’t remember, can you? It was probably somewhere back in 2010 or thereabouts, before social media took over your life.

To truly create, we need to get bored, we need to give our minds the time and space not only to wander and come up with silly, insane, goofy shit, but also time and space for it to unwind, to recover from the constant assault and overstimulation we put it through these days, everybody and their dog is suddenly diagnosed with ADHD (including me) but maybe some of that is just our overworked brain shouting for help? Reminds me of this fine piece of journalism.

It’s precisely inside that goofy shit where we find the nuggets of something good and new to create. If we don’t give our mind the space it needs we are probably just on autopilot, repeating the same patterns we are familiar with instead of actually creating something new.

These days we don’t allow ourselves to be bored, boredom somehow became the new leprosy: something to be avoided at all costs, not talked about and certainly never contemplated. I’m not sure exactly when boredom became evil but it was definitely around the proliferation of smart phone apps and the ubiquitous and malignant social media. Boredom seems to have been declared the native enemy of online cats and, as we all know too well, there is nothing more sacred than watching cats online, so off with boredom’s head!

Yet boredom is not your enemy, it is very much your friend. Remember when you were a kid, staying over at a friend’s house, both of you alone in the house, no adults around and one of you would say “I’m bored” the other would reply “me too”. And that was it, that was all the spark you needed to start inventing really weird and sometimes fucked up shit that turned out, not only to be original, but outrageously fun and usually dangerous? Sure, you got into all sorts of trouble and might even have had to pay a steep price for it (I grew up when corporal punishment was all the rage, enforced and encouraged) but man, it was definitely worth it!

The Party

One day I was over at a friend’s house and his mum took us to this fancy, adult dress party, we got there quite early because she had to help set things up. We were in our best Sunday suits and repeatedly admonished to stay clean and not get up to any shenanigans. We were not allowed inside the house since there was a delicate dance of cleaning and arranging and two twelve year old boys would quickly get underfoot, disrupt said delicate dance and simply be a nuisance so we were set adrift in the garden with the door back into civilisation firmly locked.

The garden was boring, there was fuck all to do, it was just a big, manicured garden, didn’t even have a swing set or interesting trees to climb, no ant hills to roll around in, no animal feces to explore, just a big, perfectly kept garden, damn I hated it!

We were bored. So we started walking around aimlessly, chatting and making up outrageous stories about our past exploits as you do at that age, recounting stories about our previous (mostly imagined) garden adventures. Then we spied a sprinkler, aha!

We didn’t have sprinklers in my house, sprinklers were for posh people with posh lawns, our lawn was utilitarian at best, when you could actually traverse the maze of animals and their various excreta. Our garden was interesting! So a sprinkler was a novelty. We stared at the sprinkler, the bastard was taunting us, arcing its swath of lofty water and daring us not to get wet, this would not stand, we would show that sprinkler who was boss!

We came up with a brilliant plan: we had to take turns hopping over the sprinkler without getting wet. In the beginning it went swimmingly, we just waited for it to finish its sweep and we’d jump when it was watering close to the ground. We felt good for about five seconds but this became boring very quickly, it was too easy and there wasn’t much of a challenge here. Naturally, we raised the stakes and started daring each other to jump it as close to its zenith as possible, when its watery jet was shooting up vertically.

Being that age where a challenge, no matter how small or stupid, is undeniable and affront to your very existence, we soon abandoned ourselves with reckless gusto to our daring and dashing adventure. You can imagine how we fared, soon enough we were soaked to the bone, laughing our arses off and having a grand ol’ time. Eventually my friend’s mum came out to fetch us for some menial cleaning task only to find us in a sorry state, not only dripping wet but muddy from head to toe, shoes unrecognisable under all the wet grime, our best Sunday suits ruined.

She lost her shit, set us right with a couple of spanks each and cursed us up and down with terms neither of us realised she knew, hell, some of them we’d never even heard before but in that uncanny ability kids have to save information even in the middle of a bollocking, we filed away those juicy terms for personal use later.

Her sister came out to see what the crisis was and immediately joined the fray, this was her house and she informed everyone in a very loud voice, including the neighbours three houses down, that she would not allow two dirty, scruffy, thoughtless urchins to ruin her newly-cleansed abode. We were banned from entering the house under any circumstances. Summoned by all the shouting and squealing (from both sides but the squealing came mostly from us), my friend’s dad came out and there commenced a boisterous, sweary, shouty deliberation on what to do with the two little miscreants who had the potential to once again ruin the whole party with their shenanigans.

After much shouting and gesticulating, the most popular solution turned out to be to kick us out to the curb. Literally. We were thrown out into the street to fend for ourselves, but of course it wasn’t that easy, because our suits had to be salvaged, we were made to strip to our underwear before being unceremoniously cast out of the house to find our own way home, almost naked. At night. Kilometres away. In Caracas, one of the most dangerous cities in the world. We didn’t feel great about it bu what the hell were we supposed to do? So we set off shivering in the night air without a clue as to which way was home.

Fortunately, my friend’s dad took pity on us just in the nick of time and came to our rescue. Before we’d made it very far, he told us we could spend the night in his car, until the party was over and we would all drive back home together. That would also give his mum a chance to calm down and she might eventually even be feeling less murderous. This sounded great to us. Yes we were still half naked and chilled but at least it was better than walking alone in the dark in our underwear and getting lost, raped and sold into slavery. I’m not exaggerating when I say these things actually did and do happen in Caracas.

While this was not even close to some of the crazy, destructive, reckless, thoughtless, wonderful misadventures we came up with when young, for some reason it has always been a memorable one.

The worst part was that we missed out on the whole party which, we were later informed with undisguised malice, had been magnificent. Most of our friends had attended and asked about us only to be told simply that we were “out in the car, naked and wet because we misbehaved!”