Summer Creativity Challenge #3: Boredom

It happens in the first weeks of July, after the summer semester has ended—the final projects graded, the last email conversations to students concluded, my normal work day wrapping up neatly within the confines of banker’s hours—I find myself at odd moments during a quiet evening or slow paced weekend experiencing an unfamiliar and almost forgotten sensation: boredom.

Boredom is a rare species.  It is unfocused restlessness that rides on the hands of a creeping clock.  It hovers, unseen and unnoticed, over your shoulder when you are deeply engaged.  Boredom—or the doldrums—carries with it the stigma of negativity and images of unhappy, sour-faced children waiting impatiently on the world of adults.  As a child, boredom is rainy afternoons.  It is the hour before a friend comes over.  It is tasks that you don’t want to do, like cleaning your room.  It is a lack of excitement, stimuli and adventure.

As we grow up, grow older, and take control of our own time, we often forget what it is like to be bored.  We entertain ourselves, distract ourselves, and make plans.  We consciously and subconsciously rail against boredom, eliminating it from our lives.          

We forget that boredom can have a certain magic to it.  It means a slowness of time.  It is carbonated with possibility. 

Which is why, in those moments in the summertime when my world has slowed down and I am undecided what to do next with the time that lies before me, I revel in the foreign feeling of being bored. 

Boredom is transformational.  It is that rainy afternoon from your childhood—when you picked up a soon-to-be-favorite book.  It is the task of cleaning your room—and finding a treasure trove of forgotten toys.  In C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe boredom (and a rainy day) is the precursor to the exploring of the house and discovery of the wardrobe in which Lucy finds Narnia.

Boredom inevitably gives way to discovery, which makes it very important to creativity.  At the beginning of every semester of my Creative Thinking class, I have the students read the July 2010 Newsweek Article, The Creativity Crisis.  In discussion, they always comment on the paragraph which talks about the work of renowned psychologist and creativity expert Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gary G. Gute, of Northern Iowa University, who in studying creative adults found that creativity flourishes in the space between anxiety and boredom. 

Author Mark McGuinness, in the article, Why Boredom is Good for Your Creativity, that appeared on The 99 Percent the other week (and right when I had started my thinking on this post—synchronicity!), writes about battling resistance disguised as boredom, at the beginning of a project.  He uses special tools to shut off the Internet and even writes at the library to help him stay focused.  “The British Library is a beautiful building, and purpose-designed to be one of the most boring environments on Earth - there are no enticing distractions, and the 'wall of silence' peer pressure from your fellow readers makes it hard to do anything other than sit still and keep quiet.”    

All of this is not to say that boredom doesn’t have its dark side.  As McGuiness explores in his article, and The 99 Percent’s founder, Scott Belsky, also discusses in his book Making Ideas Happen, becoming bored with ideas, right at the time that they need the most work to become tangible, is something that most creatives struggle with.  This is why many ideas never happen—they are abandoned because the work and dedication part is not as exciting as the inception.

Also, boredom by nature should be a temporary feeling.  As a creative, you should know boredom for what it is: an awkward, quiet moment before you embark on another idea or project.  It is a doorway, not a room.  If you identify it as resistance and procrastination--push through! And if you sense that it is beginning to feel like the Sargasso Sea, then I encourage you to add some Artist Dates or new challenges to your work or routine in order to set a spark to the transformation from dullness to exciting endeavor.

All of this is inspiration for the third Summer Creativity Challenge: Boredom.  This challenge is open to interpretation.  You can use it to meditate on boredom—when you last experienced it; what role it plays in your creative process; how you feel when you are bored—or you can use it as a spark of inspiration for a short story or recapture a memory of being bored as a child.  If it has been a while, you can even set up a nontraditional Artist Date to reacquaint yourself with the experience of boredom.  And ultimately new discoveries.   

With this as your touchpoint, record your impressions, writings, memories, or meditations in your sketchbook or notebook.  Record in your sketchbook any inspiration, ideas, illustrations, or thoughts—then share here on The Paper Compass. 

    

2011 Summer Challenges Commence! Tapping into a Season of Creative Experiences

Summer has arrived. Through the open windows come the sounds of lawn mowers. In the evening, the soft murmur of voices punctuated by laughter as neighbors sit on their porches and talk late into the night. The light lingers, and only by nine o’clock can the first stars be distinguished in the sky. The heat comes, tanning skin, dampening brows, and making the fans work hard through the still afternoons.

This is my favorite time of year. There is something special in the long days, the slow heat, and the sense of extended time that lends itself to creative exploration, awareness of the moment, and playfulness. As I wrote last summer, summertime seems a season where the veil between the past and the present becomes translucent. Memories rise to the surface like ice cubes in a glass of lemonade, clinking together, gently reminding you of things long forgotten or of the origins of traditions still carried out. This point of memory is a wellspring of ideas that can foster new creative endeavors or add kindling to on-going ones. Summer also gives us a feeling of there being time to relax, and creativity always blossoms when you have time to daydream.

Summer Challenges began last summer, inspired by a vague memory that turned into a weekend project to reacquaint myself with a pack of Big League Chew, a gum I hadn't had since I was about ten. From this simple adventure developed some great moments of inspiration and re-connection to many other memories (and some old friends). In the eight weeks of the Dog Days of Summer last year, we explored Candy, Books, Ice Cream, Sunrise, Sunset & High Noon, Spontaneous Play, Wanderlust, Adventures, and Alfresco as touch points for remembering and creating.

I hope that you will join us for another eight weeks of Summer Challenges. We will be exploring a number of new topics, such as Camp and The Beach, as well as many more. These posts are inspiration points for exploration to jump start creative thinking (or even an Artist Date.) They can be interpreted in many ways, and “captured” creatively through any medium from writing and painting to photography to a brief sketch. Whether they inspire you to a completed piece, point you to a long lost memory, or are noted as an idea for later use, I hope that you will share some of your experiences and work in the comment section after each post.

Happy creating!

Summer Challenge Week One: Candy

Challenge #1: What was your favorite childhood candy? By the end of the week: find, purchase and consume (or devour) your favorite childhood candy. Use all your senses. Record your experience, memories, and thoughts in your sketchbook and, if you'd like, share here on The Paper Compass.

While I have many childhood memories of summer, one of the most prevalent is of eating frozen Charleston Chews in a damp bathing suit while laying on the blazing hot Astroturf-carpeted tennis deck of the Innis Arden Country Club in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. The time spent at the country club is disproportionately recorded in my memory, but that makes sense as it involves several semi-prominent childhood experiences: my first (and only) synchronized swim performance to Pink Cadillac; the first 6 foot long sandwich I had ever seen (and eaten); and The High Dive. There were hours filled with golf and tennis lessons, many laps completed in a sloppy-but-determined manner as a member of the junior swim team, weekend family cookouts, and the highlight of the day: a single piece of candy, as allocated by my dad, and signed for using the “chit.”

Candy was kept in an industrial-sized freezer behind the white laminated counter of the pool snack bar manned by teenagers with their collars turned up. Rather than taste, logic governed the selection of the Charleston Chew: it was the biggest (read: longest) piece of candy in the freezer. Hence it was the best ROI for the single selection my brother and I were given. After standing on my toes to sign the chit with a stunted golf score card pencil, the candy was taken up to the tennis deck to be either cracked into pieces and eaten slowly, or gnawed at, the chocolate melting first, until a bite sized piece came off.

In retrospect, I marvel that I still have teeth.

Candy seems to (sadly, yet fortunately) hold less appeal as we grow older. Yet, it is a powerful vehicle for tapping into memories and into the mindset of our younger-selves as seen in the instance above.

This inspires the first Summer Challenge: Candy Treat. What was your favorite childhood candy? Where did you buy it or whom shared it with you? Did you have it all year round or was it something seasonal, like the frozen Charleston Chews?

This week make it a To Do list priority to find your favorite candy from childhood. Once you have it, take a good 15 minutes to enjoy (or take in) the experience of eating it. Record your thoughts, memories, and experience in your sketchbook—and here on the blog in the comments section!

Summer Challenges Commence! Tapping into a Season of Creative Experiences

“She needed the sun to mellow and temper her mood to the sticking point.” – The Awakening, Kate Chopin

Summer is my favorite season for creative exploration. Fall is for thinking and working, winter for nesting and dreaming, spring for planning and awakening, and summer—summer is for relaxing and adventuring. This combination of playfulness and exploration seems to unlock something within. The veil between the current moment and memory seems thinner, more transparent, lending itself to glimpses of our childhood; our own current desire to slow down and enjoy, even if just for an afternoon; and sometimes it allows us to rediscover our inner wanderlust and desire to try new things. All of these elements come together to create a perfect season for tapping into our deep well of personal experiences for creative inspiration.

Last summer, inspired by a random childhood memory of bubble gum, I decided to revisit Big League Chew. It became a weekend mission to locate a pack of Big League Chew, which I was lucky to find down town at Walgreens. On the way back home, I opened the pouch and the scent of the powdered strings of gum, with its deep chemical purple color, transported me back to elementary school and the local 5&10 store C.W. Curry’s in Old Greenwich.

All this before I even put the gum in my mouth, which was its own time-travel experience. I was so excited by this endeavor that I enlisted my childhood partners-in-crime, my brother and sister, to do the same thing by the end of the week. This call to action, usually in the form of a text message, to hunt something down to remember it better, continued informally over the summer and was a point of much discussion of old and good memories. It also was a great source of details for stories that I was writing in my creative writing workshop that I take in the summer with Julia Thacker.

This summer, I thought that I would use the next eight weeks, the “dog days of summer” to invite all The Paper Compass readers to embark on Summer Challenges and share their experiences. I will post the challenge and then everyone can reply in the comment thread. You can speak of the memory, or the act of doing the challenge, or discuss a creative project that you may be inspired towards. Many of my memories were captured in my sketchbook or short writing assignments. I encourage you to do the same so that you can record the experience for future inspiration.

I hope that you will join us on this playful and creative exploration of the summer season.