Last month, I had to report for jury duty for the first time. I did
sort of know what to expect: mostly, sitting around in a room waiting for my
name to be called. I attempted to be prepared. I brought four books with me,
and some pen and paper in case any story ideas came to me (never leave home without it!).
I was told that most often you either get picked for a jury
or let out before lunch. But on the day I went, they were trying to select jury
for a six week trial. So they let us go to lunch, but then they held us. So we
waited. And waited. And waited.
Not long after we got back from lunch, I was ready to crawl
up the walls with boredom. I’d finished one book and was thoroughly sick of
reading. Normally, I like to fill any stretch of unused time with Story
Thoughts and Plotting. But something about that situation, about being stuck in
one room and not being able to escape, killed every bit of creativity I had.
Ah, boredom. The force that takes free time and somehow
turns it into mindless, soul-numbing frustration. Sounds like something to be
entirely avoided at any cost, right?
My personal view of being bored: like my mind is suffering in a giant burning pit
Photo from Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of a creative commons license. Attribution to Tormod Sandtorv / Darvasa gas crater panorama / CC BY-SA 2.0
Well, I’m not so sure.
In our society, boredom used to happen a lot more. Waiting in lines, sitting
in train stations. But then someone invented the smart phone, and suddenly, the
number of people staring into space decreased rapidly. I still have a regular
old cell phone, and a new IPhone is not exactly in my budget. So for know I
remain an observer.
But I have to wonder – what are we losing out on, now that
we no longer have those moments to wonder and dream? How many genius ideas are
we missing out on, because someone was playing Angry Birds rather than
calculating a way to make the mailing of packages more efficient? Never mind
any social contact that might be lost.
Of course, not all moments lend themselves to creative
thoughts. Some moments, like my jury duty, are rather soul crushing. And we'll always have traffic (at least, those of us in So Cal will).
And that leaves me with the questions for today: how do you
take an empty moment and make it creative rather than boring? Some things are
out of our control: setting, noise, the number of idiots on the road. The amount of time we wait at jury duty.
My ideas for coping so far are few. All I've got is being prepared: bring a certain
number of books. Or make preparations to encourage creativity, like making a list of story problems you want to solve before you even leave.
How do you make boredom disappear, or transform into something new?
