Remember how impossibly long and boring summer seemed when you were a kid? It was a good sort of boring. You’d lay on your bed, staring at the ceiling. Then you’d lay on the couch for a while, staring at the ceiling. Then your mom came in and told you to go outside. Then you’d go outside and stare at the clouds. It was boring, and it was awesome, and you were a tiny galaxy of creative thought. What if the neighbor with the green van, the creepy guy who sleeps when everyone else is awake and is awake when everyone else is asleep, is the one who abducted the Three Missing Women? What would happen if you stepped through these two old trees and entered an alternate reality that looked just like this one but nobody could see or hear you, and you lived the rest of your life a ghost? If you hit these two rocks together hard enough, would it make a fire? Is that how fire is made?
In Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self, Manoush Zomorodi (host of the podcast Note to Self) argues for the importance of letting your mind wander. Time spent in “default mode” -- i.e. not focusing on any particular task, i.e. staring at the ceiling -- is when our brain does its best creative thinking. If our brain is constantly engaged, if every little in-between moment of waiting is occupied by the easy gratification of a newsfeed, our brilliance takes a serious hit.
I have this habit that I really hate: when I pull up to a red light, I reach for my phone, tap on any notification that pops up, and just sort of mindlessly dart from one app to another. Seeking the shallow confirmation of a like, I guess; grasping for some tiny human connection. (Or not human, exactly. Human...y.) I bet you do this, too. I bet when you’re waiting in a doctor’s office you scroll through your newsfeed to pass the time instead of just sitting there on the ugly mauve chair being bored and finding patterns in the equally ugly wallpaper. Who can blame you? You want to know what’s going on with people who are not currently sitting on an ugly mauve chair. It’s a human weakness. It’s the same impulse that made women in Jane Austen novels agonize by the mailbox, waiting for word from Mr. Hotbreeches to arrive with the afternoon post, except that now the post can come any time, anywhere. We agonize by the mailbox (so to speak) 24/7. We’re not inherently less disciplined or shallower than our foremothers, we just have more opportunity to be undisciplined and shallow.
I live alone, and sometimes I imagine what someone walking by my house would think if they peeped in my window (not hard to do: my cats have obliterated the blinds). They’d see a woman, hunched over her little glowing screen, slack-jawed, staring, scrolling dumbly. I am not a sad and lonely person, but getting lost in the smartphone makes me *feel* sad and lonely. It makes me feel like the least interesting Black Mirror episode.
Zomorodi’s book started as a challenge that she gave her podcast listeners, a seven-step program for reclaiming your default mode. Step Two is “Keep your devices out of reach while in motion,” so obviously it’s resonating with me. A dutiful challengee, I’ve been resisting the urge to reach for the phone at the stoplight, and instead just sitting there with my thoughts.
Am I brilliant now, as Zomorodi promised? Well, no (NOT YET), but I feel like I have a little bit more control, at least. My brain feels less cluttered, good conditions for creativity to eventually take root. I feel like the Jane Austen heroine who, while secretly very anxious to receive word from Hotbreeches, has the dignity and presence of mind to pretend to care more about her embroidery than whether the post has arrived. I feel...human-y.
