You’re reading A Holy Wonder, a newsletter about cultivating creativity as a way of life. Subscribe to get it to your inbox.
A few months ago, I read a book by Kevin Hood Gary called Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life. It explored the role of boredom and leisure in education. There’s an example from the book that I want to share because I think it’s an insightful way to think about cultivating creativity.
Many schools are focused on assessing, analyzing, and critiquing, which are “ratio” forms of knowing (discursive rather than contemplative). To help students develop wonder and appreciation (skills we need as creatives), one professor created an assignment for her students to help them. Art historian Joanna Ziegler required her students to visit a local museum, and they were given the choice of three paintings. Each week for thirteen weeks, the students had to visit their choice of the same painting and sit in the same place at the same time to view it for an hour. Then each week they had to submit a five-page paper about their observations with no outside sources.
While the students initially resisted, they realized the merits of this practice. Their essays revealed their relationship to a work they knew by heart. Moreover, they grew from “superficial spectators … into skilled, disciplined beholders with a genuine claim to deep and intimate knowledge of a single work of art—and they knew it.”
Here’s what’s helpful about this assignment, which Gary points out in his book:
1. Choice Limitations
We too need to limit our choices. If a million ideas are floating in our head, we need to pick one and get to work on it. I recently heard a writer say that he wrote his book in just a few months. How? He already had the idea in his mind, but the key to getting it on paper was how he limited his choices. He worked on it every morning for three hours at the same coffee shop with the same drink order. He never had to use his mental capacity to think about anything else. He could simply focus on his book.
2. Physical Presence
We need to be in the world, not on our devices. Seeing art at a museum is nothing like seeing it on our phone. How much time are we devoting to being present to something for an extended period of time?
3. Ritual Observance
We need to be aware of place and time. If you aren’t going to a museum, maybe you are visiting your favorite park and watching how the landscape changes through the seasons. Maybe you are watching your children and reflecting on your time with them over the years. Annie Dillard wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek based on journals she kept that recorded her observations at Tinker Creek. She uses the seasons as a way of structuring the book. Seasons are always helpful to how we reflect on our experiences. Perhaps your home is your “Tinker Creek.”
4. Solitude
Sometimes we need to be alone to see things well—to see things without interruption or another view infringing on our own. Just as community is important, so is our sense of comfort with being in our own interior landscape. A space that fosters contemplation is silent and still. Josef Pieper notes, “Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture—and ourselves.” Leisure is a state of the soul that helps us embrace our true identity, allowing us to see ourselves as distinct from our productivity or usefulness. It invites us to enter into reality and embrace what surrounds us through our own thinking, wondering, reflecting, and appreciating.
“We can think of boredom as a harbinger of meaning,” Gary writes. What might be considered “boredom” could be exactly what we need to cultivate our creativity.
I’m curious: How comfortable are you with boredom? Does boredom cultivate or stifle your creativity?
Thanks for subscribing to A Holy Wonder. If you’ve enjoyed the newsletter, I invite you to share it with others.
I’m used to be so terrible with boredom, but have worked hard on it. I can see this same trait in my oldest, so I intentionally work on it with him, hoping that he won’t have to work on it so much as an adult as I’ve had to