In praise of down time, or why a little boredom isn’t bad

A wise educator once encouraged her students and their parents to "Give yourselves July." What she meant was to use the summer break from school routine to claim the gift of down time: Put your feet up. Make friends with your hammock. Sit by the dock of the bay. Take some deep, satisfying breaths. I don’t think the productive, active woman who said this would actually encourage anyone to claim his inner sloth, but maybe she’d be okay with saying it’s okay to be a little bit bored.

Sure, someone who lives on an academic calendar has the luxury of taking a month off of regular life, you might think. Even with a freelance schedule, my family has days when 15 minutes of conversation in the car or reading a few pages of a book together before bed are the only times I actually connect with my kids. But I think we can all look at how we can give ourselves a quantity of time for a deeper quality of experience for ourselves as parents, and to model for our children. I am not exactly talking about cultivating boredom, but I am talking about managing it lightly.

In many ways, I’m a very different kind of mom than my own was; yet there’s one thing I must have absorbed by osmosis into my parenting repertoire. Just as I can hear my younger self in my kids’ pleadings: "Mom, I’m bored" or "I don’t have anything to do," I can hear my mother’s clipped, certain response in my own voice: "Well, I’m sorry you’re bored," with a concise list of suggestions revolving around housework, reading, or venturing outdoors. I have not wavered from this attitude over the years, and now it’s unusual to hear them voice their boredom, partly because they do keep themselves busy and are pretty good planners, partly because they’ve learned I’m not going to go all gushy and drop everything to enable their entertainment jones.

Still our culture tends to view idleness as the devil’s playground, or something along that line. It’s true that some kids, in sort of a perversely productive way, fill the boredom gap with tried-and-true attention-getting and time-killing activities, which may well be illicit or at least ill-advised. Others are unused to having to find something to do independently, since they’re calendared as tightly as a newly strung tennis racket. Finding themselves unstructured is a rare occurrence, and possibly a bewildering one. Yet some children are nothing like overscheduled but may spend their time in front of screens, which seems to both instigate and mask boredom.

A former co-worker and I would laugh about what we dubbed our "one-minute vacations." On midsummer days, we’d sometimes find ourselves gazing out the window, slightly slack-jawed, at the blue sky background framing the downtown skyline outside our office window (hey, at least we had a window). Of course, we’d easily snap back to the reality of life in our shared workspace, but I like to think that this exercise in boredom was just what we needed to appreciate the larger life beyond our call-back lists and upcoming meetings.

By the time this is published, my family and I will be the beneficiaries of some planned down time in the Boundary Waters. A camping vacation normally hardly qualifies as down time, but when we discussed our trip as a family, it became clear that the three kids did not want a week of constant portaging, paddling, and setting up camp in a new place each evening. We decided to pare down our itinerary to just a couple of stops, and we’ll take day trips from our wilderness outposts. We will embrace the opportunity to sit in camp chairs and read, float on our backs in a cold lake, listen to loons, stargaze.

August is a terrific time to give yourself some freedom to not "do" but be. Find a favorite park, porch, lake, or field. Go there and do something relatively idle. Look at clouds. Read a book. Toss a Frisbee. Make daisy chains. Whatever it takes to get out of the confines of your own skin and into a sense of connectedness with the wider world.

And perhaps, come September and the turning of the year for families with kids, you will find a way to calendar some of that precious August freedom year-round.

Kris Berggren is a productive, active woman who loves and embraces her inner sloth.