Creativity and All Things Boredom

Everything we love shapes us. Have you heard of Cabinets of Curiosities, also known as Wunderkammer?

Scott Adams

I’ve been thinking extensively about creativity and noticed something interesting. When I’m at a retreat or even doing a more extended meditation session at home, it often feels like I suddenly get flooded with lots of creative ideas. It’s fascinating as the moments where I experience this creative flow are also where I feel like I‘ve touched my core again. No doubts, no insecurities, just me being in the moment with my ideas. Like being a child again. When we are born, we have no doubts and put no limitations on ourselves, and we experience reality as a field of infinite possibilities. Unfortunately, we lose a lot of that by the time we become adults.

For the longest time in my life, I thought I wasn’t a creative person. I used to think I had nothing to offer the world like a painter, poet, or musician does, which made me conclude that I wasn’t a creative person even though deep down I wanted to be. It was only when I thought about it in more depth that I realised that all this time I’d been mixing up creative output with being creative. In the end, painting, writing a poem or making music is just the output of how artists express their creativity, but it doesn’t mean that people who haven’t found their output yet are not creative. I think all of us are creative deep down in our core, hidden underneath all the noise, but some people have found ways to express themselves while others, perhaps through fear or insecurity, haven’t.

ART IS THEFT as Pablo Picasso once said. Creativity at its most basic level is recycling ideas, thoughts and experiences, trying to connect the dots and make something unique by finding ways to express it. All new ideas are a mash-up of older ideas. Everything we love shapes us. Have you heard of Cabinets of Curiosities, also known as Wunderkammer? Throughout history, Cabinets of Curiosities were used as collections to reflect the particular curiosities of their curators. Our mind is like a Wunderkammer filled with memories of places, people we’ve met, experiences we’ve accumulated, books we read, songs we heard and movies we watched. These mental scrapbooks influence our creativity. But for us to access the scrapbook, we need to become still. Our conscious mind is like a computer on which we can run carefully selected programs. However, our unconscious mind is like Google’s vast data centres ¹. Our unconscious mind needs time and space before it can even have the chance to figure out more complex things.

I think the greatest need of our time is to clear out the enormous mass of mental rubbish that clutters our mind, and one of the most critical skills both now and in the future is the ability to be selective and conscious about what we feed our minds with on a daily basis. We are constantly engaged and stimulated thanks to technology and our busy social lives. Don’t get me wrong, technology is fantastic, and our phones make our lives so much easier, but they also take a lot away from us.

Our brains become more and more disengaged as we fill every minute of our day with stimulation. I admit that I’m just as guilty as everyone else, often using my breaks to go on social media to treat myself. But is that really taking a break if we use it to fill our minds with even more mental clutter? And why do we see social media as a treat? It’s funny how the endless gratification offered by our devices means that the experience of being bored now becomes something we have to choose to do so that switching off is a significant act of discipline. I’ll go even further — boredom has become a luxury in our life.

The less I have on my mind, the more creative ideas evolve. It is so important that we give ourselves the time and space to be lost — where we don’t know what was in the news this morning, who messaged on WhatsApp and what our friends posted on their stories, a time of the day where we can just be ourselves and where the world is external to us. I love my technology-free mornings. It is my sacred time. My mind is fresh and I’m still in a quasi-dream state with no anxiety and no to-do list. Stillness helps me to breathe new life into ordinary things and I’m trying to learn more and more how to have disconnectedness within the connected world. Ask yourself, when did you last feel bored and didn’t act on it by reaching to your phone or distracting yourself with something else?

“Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.” Peter Bregman

Most of us recognise the need to slow down and create more space in our lives, but we sometimes don’t know how to do it. One simple way is to turn our daily habits into minor rituals where we give what we do conscious attention and intention. It’s a great way to make ordinary things more special and even enhance special things to become extra-special. So, instead of drinking your coffee/tea while scrolling through your phone or emails in the morning, try making a small ritual out of it.

What turns a habit into a ritual is the attention to detail and awareness of the moment. I love taking my time over making coffee in the morning. I focus on each small step and then, once I’m done, I sip it slowly and really concentrate on enjoying the flavour. No matter how busy I am, I like to have a say in my day by being intentional in the morning, making sure I take some time for myself, even if it’s only 15min.

If you want to take things further, I would highly recommend trying choiceless mediation. Meditation has been life-changing for me and I first came across choiceless meditation during a retreat in Sri Lanka a couple of years ago with my teacher Upul Gamage. I also call it the no effort meditation. Basically, you don’t need to do anything. Sit down and take a couple of deep breaths. I always start my meditation with a short intention. Usually, I say to myself that this is my time to take a break from this busy world, and I deserve this no matter how long my to-do list is.

I highly recommend a minimum of 20 minutes, ideally longer, to give your mind time to settle, even if that takes you to a point where you start to experience boredom. Actually, this is good because it means your mind is no longer super-busy. Just carry on — all you have to do is sit and observe whatever comes up. If thoughts come, thoughts come. Don’t fight them, but also don’t embrace them. If you feel something, you feel something. If you hear something, you hear something. Just allow all sensations, good and bad, without dwelling on them.

I do choiceless meditation most days, usually for an hour, but if I’m super time-pressed 30 minutes. The key is to have no expectations. I fall into this trap sometimes, thinking just because I had fantastic ideas yesterday, today I will have another session with great ideas. These sessions are actually not to generate ideas, but rather to give ourselves time and space to disconnect from the world around us, though a wonderful by-product is that this often naturally leads our brain to tap into our unconscious mind and stimulate creative ideas.

When people tell me that they don’t have time to meditate or slow down, what they are usually telling me is that they are not making it a priority. Believe me, I don’t find this easy to do every day, but I carve out time for it because I know it is a powerful act of self-care to remind myself that I want to live an intentional life where I show up for myself and have a say in who I am today.

I will finish off with this powerful quote by Scott Adams:

“I’ve noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding or entertaining me.”

Loads of Love

Tugba

References:

[1] Deep Work — Cal Newport