On a recent warm August afternoon, a friend buttonholed me. He and my brother had just been sitting outside on some new steps, talking at length about basketball, the old days and other stuff that people who hadn't seen each other for a while tend to go on about.
Don Jones enjoyed what the Irish call the craic, the talk, but the mere act of sitting there, as he would have on a summer vacation half a century ago, was what was particularly transportive.
“As kids we sat on curbs,” he said by email Monday when I asked him what had gotten him all excited. “We stopped and looked around. We picked up stones ... and sticks and bugs, but we noticed where we were, what small and big things were around us.”
Jones, who once bounced the basketball for the Saint Patrick's High Fighting Irish and today designs simulations and games for leadership development, when he isn't writing non-fiction or fiction, went on: “As a kid it is that stopping and noticing that changes time and makes, for instance, the summer vacation seem endless.”
I was thinking about his words Monday because I live next to a school yard, where — with the days of summer vacation winding down — I watched kids riding their bicycles, contorting their bodies on climbing apparatuses and just sitting there doing the kinds of mundane things that Jones harkened back to.
He and I both recall that there were hardly any organized activities back in the prehistoric days.
While on vacation, back before iPhones and laptops, when there weren't camps to teach you how to act, play soccer or the bass, we didn't do much of anything at all.
Games were invented. A lot of times we just walked around, rode our bikes, or just sat there, talking about pointless things.
It was, as I recall, kind of dull, in that the pulse did not race, and life's endless possibilities were not in any way on display.
Yet, I remember those times fondly and not just because I was a kid, and my childhood was a blessed one, but because I was able to be bored back then, at a time when I could while away whole afternoons doing nothing at all.
This, it seems to me, is what it must be like to be a kid today, when social distancing makes it hard, sometimes impossible, to do the kinds of things that 21st-century kids are used to doing.
The difference, perhaps, is that boredom was not viewed as a failure of imagination, as has been the way of thinking of so many big thinkers over the years, according to a recent, anything-but-boring, piece in The New Yorker magazine.
Margaret Talbot writes that in the first century, Seneca, the Roman philosopher, political leader, and orator, referred to a mood called taedium vitae, triggered by contemplating the cyclical nature of life: “How long will things be the same? Surely I will be awake, I will sleep, I will be hungry, I will be cold, I will be hot. Is there no end? Do all things go in a circle?”
The notion of boredom as an abomination is even more acute now, in the age of the pandemic when so many underemployed people have so much time on their hands.
At any given hour on Twitter, my social media of choice, you are sure to read about people's baking and gardening exploits, their home renovation feats, their herculean mental and physical accomplishments.
I agree with those who think that a form of pandemic-shaming has emerged since COVID-19 has hit. If you haven't cut a few minutes from your 10-kilometre time, or written a book of sonnets, well, you're viewed as some sort of underachieving layabout.
I've done my part in sparking this prejudice, having written a column wondering if the great pause caused by the coronavirus will lead to a cultural renaissance, in the way that William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton flourished during previous pandemics.
To my knowledge, no great ideas were forged when Jones sat there, years ago, in the west end of Halifax watching a friend smell and taste the rocks they picked up off the ground.
Just as not a single poetic line popped into my head as I tried to set a record for bouncing a tennis ball consecutively off the side of Sir Charles Tupper school.
But there are studies — quite a few of them actually — that show how boredom is good for the brain. It gives the mind a chance to shut down and rest. As a 2019 study in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries concluded, boredom can spur individual productivity and creativity.
In the social-distanced days ahead we will see whether this true.
When our minds have a little more opportunity to wander, maybe we will even have an answer for the ageold adult question: where does the time go?
“It hasn't gone anywhere,” says Jones, who thinks it's just sitting on the curb, waiting for us to sit down beside it once again.
Maybe, we will even have an answer for the age-old adult question: where does the time go?
“It hasn't gone anywhere,” says Jones, who thinks it's just sitting on the curb, waiting for us to sit down beside it once again.
