A Mind Like Water

Why Boredom is the Key to Unlocking Your Creativity

“Boredom is your window… Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open.”

Joseph Brodsky

“Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”

Albert Einstein

I can recall a few times in my life, during cocktail parties, work-related events and planning sessions, when I was afforded the opportunity to spend a few hours with individuals who seemed almost entirely devoid of creative thought, absent of anything even remotely outside the box, and who seemed vehemently opposed to any notion that threatened to shift their current assumptions of life or their chosen habits.

It's a strange thing to witness, even more to engage with, especially since I've spent much of my life around relatively open-minded people. But this phenomenon isn't rare and it's becoming more commonplace in our era thanks to an ever-increasing grab-bag of distraction goodies. More importantly, it isn't merely an intellectual disappointment, but a kind of individual and collective blunder that threatens the course of life, both for ourselves and society.

“When we immediately fill these spaces of potentiality and intellectual and emotional fertility, we close off the gates between our conscious and subconscious minds, and between our senses and everything going on around us.”

I realize that sounds dramatic. But to the extent that each one of us can and chooses to access our creative center, we will realize not only personal growth but societal change. The greatest enemy creativity ever went up against was not idiocy, but a lack of boredom, which is to say…a lack of the space and time that give rise to the fullness of creation. This is the deliberate boredom I speak of now. It is the will to exist inside of unfilled and as of yet, unfulfilled passages of existence, so that the less conventional, more explorative and contrary energies of creativity can come out of hiding and walk about freely on our streets a while.

When we immediately fill these voids, these spaces of potentiality and intellectual and emotional fertility, we close off the gates between our conscious and subconscious minds, and between our senses and everything going on around us. We entertain ourselves to death. Constant distraction annihilates curiosity. Constant activity robs us of our creative energy, like one too obsessed with pleasing themselves on their own time, they have nothing left for their lover.

Boredom and Ideas

Ideas, especially good ones, are born from open spaces, from scarcity or lack, from the absence of both things and activities which compete for our attention. And man, do we have a lot of competition for our attention these days. It's not surprising that many of the most revolutionary concepts in human history came from eventually famous and wealthy individuals while they were still poor and obscure.

This, of course, isn't to say that they didn't or aren't still coming up with grand inventions (some of them are). Still, many such individuals have gone on to simply manage what they've already developed (something necessary but different from invention), or in the worst of cases, spend their days and nights with some equivalent of hookers and blow.

The creative energy within each one of us is accessible in any environment and at any point in life, but it is at its most vibrant when it has room to play, space to roam freely in the halls and cathedrals of our psyche, unmolested by the frequent distractions of our over-connected life.

The Vacuum

By nature, and so much different than most things in our existence, creativity doesn't abhor, but adores a vacuum. Creative thought both revels and reproduces itself in uncluttered and sparsely inhabited realms. It's very lifeblood is kept vital by the relationship it has to barren internal and external landscapes. Creativity longs to fill, to expand.

Creativity loves necessity. But this isn't to say that it only desires emptiness. We all know how certain stimulants (cognitive and emotional - not chemical) can ignite creative output, things like music, images, movies, art, conversation with friends, exercise, and others. But usually these creative forms of fuel exist as a tighter concentric ring inside a wider open space. Even these external sparks are used to separate us from the machine-like motions of our automated habits and usual routes of thought.

Two Routes to One Goal

I'm reminded of a pair of examples from U2's career, for what are arguably their two most seminal albums, and two collections of music whose congruency of quality could only be equaled by their stylistic disimilarity.

During the making of 1987's The Joshua Tree, the four spent time in open landscapes, namely certain Irish regions, but moreso, the vast deserts of the American Southwest. This journey had a profound effect on the final product. They created an album of physical exploration and spiritual expanse, music that personified what it feels like to wander dry and barren spaces whose lack of physical life bring the spiritual and emotional more readily to the surface.

Physical space and silence as catalysts for psychological and spiritual abundance (an idea that exists as a microcosm of this entire concept - the way potential in waiting, space unfilled, becomes the ignition point for the fires of creative thought and innovation). This is also illuminated in the account of Jesus being led into the desert to be tempted. U2's choices fed a work whose effect on the listener holds a spiritual and philosophical weight usually reserved for epic poetry and classic literature.

A few years later, while in a much different headspace, and in preparation for their 1991 release, Achtung Baby, U2 went the opposite direction, by throwing themselves into the center of activity, into the very heart of conflict, revolution, and noise. Hoping to garner a few sparks from the celebration of the recent collapse of the Berlin Wall, the breaking of the Soviet Union and its stranglehold on Eastern Europe, along with the buzzing, flashing, sweating, thumping madness of European dance clubs, industrial music, overcrowded subways, American television, social unrest, and the ecstasy of families and lovers at last reunited in the newly liberated stretches of the old world, they set out to record at Hansa Studios Berlin, the same place where David Bowie once fashioned a handful of his most groundbreaking works.

While this period was infamously fraught with creative turmoil and internal conflict, it also gave rise to not only one of U2's finest albums, but along with the Joshua Tree, two of the greatest albums in rock history. It was a work that embodied all the mad, contradictory, liberating and confusing energy of beautiful and violent new possibilities, and a sonic exploration they've yet to top. It was the sound of one era dying even as it gave birth to a new one, a massive album on a global scale whose core was perhaps the most intimate in their history up to that point, an album largely about the equally beautiful and painful journey of love - first between lovers or spouses, and beyond this, that which connects fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, exiles to their tribe, both lost and found, and nations to nations.

“They put themselves in a bag and shook it up. And this self-made prison and subsequent shaking rattled loose and ultimately freed them from chains that threatened to keep them back from achieving something greater.”

But even in the buzzing insanity of Achtung Baby's overstimulated conception, this creative direction was still a deliberate choice to remove themselves from their usual patterns of life and collaboration. The activity existed inside a larger inactivity, or a larger space of differentiating themselves from common modes of discourse and creative output.

They put themselves in a bag and shook it up. And this self-made prison and subsequent shaking rattled loose and ultimately freed them from chains that threatened to keep them back from achieving something greater, and conflicts which threatened to unravel the very fabric of both their partnership and friendships. Their chosen space of isolation and internal frenzy saved them from larger, hidden beasts that would have likely consumed them not long after had they not been forced to deal with them in so dramatic a fashion.

One of the most important keys to take away here, though, is that even while the initial frenzy of their Hansa trip brought several great ideas and sketches of songs, it wasn't until they returned to their studio in Dublin to quiet things down, that the real meat and marrow of the songs began to form. So, in both cases, it ultimately came down to a certain level of stillness or disconnection from the norm, that opened the creative floodgates. In some ways, Hansa was the fight they needed to have, the breaking of something assumed, or habitual, so that they were made ready for the fullness of what was to come.

The Devils of Productivity and Efficiency

These two examples illustrate the need for allowing ourselves unbothered space within the larger scope of daily life so we can wander the open stretches of creative thought. Most of the time we need to quiet the world to hear our own creative voice clearly - so that our mind, finally unstimulated for long enough, can, from the now reawakened soil, bring forth some form of new life. Other times, simply allowing our thoughts to roam freely is all it takes - to stop ordering every mental action and subjugating our cognitive potential to the machinations of pure efficiency.

This isn't mere speculation. Numerous studies, varying in observational and clinical methods, confirm the fact that boredom and a mind left unproductive for a time, are invaluable components in the ability of free, creative thought to flourish. Specifically, these more fluid states of mind increase our access to convergent and divergent modes of thinking. Convergence readies us for problem-solving and divergence for ideation, or unique perspectives and new concepts.

Yes, unproductive. One of creativity's fiercest opponents is constant productivity - a mind which seeks to forever "get things done." Creativity doesn't speak the same language as efficiency and productivity, whose aims are largely to accomplish necessary tasks. Don't misunderstand me, productivity and efficiency are wonderful things in the right context. And creative thought leads to solutions that increase both of these within individual and organizational arenas alike. But a mind always enslaved by internal task-masters habitually sworn to productivity above all else won't ever find the depths of creativity they were meant to access.

“Creative thought, inspiration, wild leaps of ingenuity and imagination, these require a notable lack of analysis. ”

Certain processes of our brain don't really crank up until we afford them some dead air space. There is a kind of simultaneous turning off and on that takes place. We put certain aspects of our frontal cortex on auto-pilot, things governing actions like planning and attention and more immediate problem-solving. This decreases our filtering mechanisms. Why is this important? It isn't simply for us to enjoy feeling a bit tipsy, mentally, that is. No, aggressive filtering, something often necessary to rigorous analytical processes, is the death of creativity.

Creative thought, inspiration, wild leaps of ingenuity and imagination, these require a notable lack of analysis. They require a kind of thinking without thinking, a space where we are moving fluidly between thoughts and hunches, between images and concepts, without filtering them for practicality, applicability, and sanity, things that should come much later.

In creative exploration, our minds function more like water moving unchecked and untamed from stone to stone in a river. Order, during these times, is our enemy. Order comes later. Much like it is in writing, especially in fiction; you write first from pure inspiration, more from the unconscious mind. Then later, when you edit and revise, you write with your conscious mind, your frontal cortex, to shape the raw work into its final form.

The key is to afford oneself some distance from automated choices and boredom-killing activities. It is about contradicting the mindset and the temporary but usually meaningless emotional release that comes so easily to us when we constantly distract ourselves with activities and media.

From Some Other Place

While it prefers, and often needs it, curiously enough, emptiness is not the original home of creativity. Nor is it native to dense environments where every corner is bustling with activity. Creativity is a thing apart. It is invasive, in the most benevolent way. It is from some other place. It is outside our everyday existence and yet so normal to everything we do.

Pure creativity comes from the realms of the unconscious and of the spirit if you will. When we allow it the space needed and freely invite it to do so, it passes from the ever-liquid realm of the unconscious and the ever-changing realm of the external, into the everyday and commonplace. It frequently tests the water and tip-toes into various corners of our lives. But it refuses to dive in headfirst unless we clear the pool of neon float toys and random party crashers - which are the innumerable space-filling choices we have access to with such little effort, and the options that equally carry so little value for us as spiritual, moral, and creative beings.

Next time you find yourself wanting to immediately fill the potential of open space or calm the sting of boredom with some show, some online activity or random household task, don't. Step back and allow the space to go unfilled. Allow yourself to experience the discomfort of emptiness, the unrest of an internal void. Let yourself just be and eventually the electric current of untouched creativity will begin to hum.

Next week, we'll look at boredom and space in the context of one's spiritual and philosophical pursuits.