The Unstructured Summer

“I’m the child of your rainy Sundays.

I watched time crawl
Over the ceiling
Like a wounded fly.
. . .
I know Heaven’s like that.
In eternity’s classrooms,
The angels sit like bored children
With their heads bowed.”

These lines from a poem called "To Boredom," penned by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic, perfectly capture my current fascination with boredom, especially in the context of my teenage son’s ongoing summer vacation this year.

My son will start high school this Fall. I love the concept of ‘gap year’—the year-long break some students take typically between high school and college (as Malia Obama famously did). While we don’t quite have a whole year between middle school and high school, we decided to make this summer a ‘gap summer’ —an agenda-free, unstructured one, fully knowing that it might make my son feel bored.

But I believe in the power of boredom to lead to creativity. In my summer 2013 blog ‘Ode to boredom,' I wrote: “Creativity must have these pregnant phases of nothingness to retool its cradle, i.e., your brain.” This observation was based on just my own instinct at that time. But since then I have found both anecdotal and research-based support to back-up my position.

For example, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creative genius behind the celebrated Broadway musical ‘Hamilton,’ emphasized that it’s good to be bored. He wrote: “Time alone is the gift of self-entertainment—and that is the font of creativity. Because there is nothing better to spur creativity than a blank page or an empty bedroom. I have fond memories of pretending ninjas were going to come into every room of the house and thinking to myself, What is the best move to defend myself? How will I ‘Home Alone’ these ninjas? I was learning to create incredible flights of fancy.”

Some psychologists actually recommend that children be bored in the summer. Dr. Teresa Belton, an education expert said in a BBC interview that boredom could be an "uncomfortable feeling," because society has developed an expectation of being constantly occupied and constantly stimulated externally, but boredom is crucial for developing “internal stimulus,” which then allows true creativity. 

And unstructured idleness is healthy not only for the children. Author Brian O’Connor wrote an article in the TIME magazine in the summer of 2018, reminding adults why doing nothing is one of the most important things they can do.

So far freestyling the summer vacation is working well for all of us. Our son is spending significantly more time in the kitchen, whipping up delicious avocado toasts and made-from-scratch pizzas when he is bored. He is playing way too much video games with his friends for sure, but he is also going for a run with our dog in the middle of the day, practicing his conversational Bengali with grandpa while gardening with him, or biking to the local library, picking up not only a new book, but also a cup of bubble tea on his way back.

Suddenly, not planning the summer feels like the smartest thing that we planned for our son this year.