Boredom is the Mother of Creativity (S18E3)

I'm recording this from staying at my dad's place so the audio might sound a little bit different from usual and I wanted to share a reflection that came to me when I was in London earlier this week. Welcome to the Henny Flynn podcast, the space for deepening self awareness with profound self compassion. I'm Henny. I write, coach and speak about how exploring our inner world can transform how we experience our outer world, all founded on a bedrock of self love. Settle in and listen and see where the episode takes you.

And if we're connected through Instagram then you might have seen that I've been doing some filming, I've been doing a photoshoot, I've also had some really great meetings with people as well. And then the weeks culminated in seeing one of my brothers and also being here with my dad and that is lovely. Through And that time in London I've been really struck with the importance of boredom which when I just told my dad that I was about to come and do a podcast episode about being bored He couldn't quite believe that's what I was going to come and talk about. And then when I shared with him why I feel that being bored is so important, he kind of got it. Now the only piece of parenting advice that my mum gave me was to let my son be bored and I thought it was quite an odd piece of advice because you know this is kind of twenty five years ago and definitely the kind of parenting style was to engage and to educate and to inform your children and what she said was let him be bored don't endlessly amaze and distract him let him be bored so that he has to become creative and I've reflected on that a lot, both you know in reflection on you know how did it affect him, that I did let him be bored and what is the relationship between boredom and creativity and I feel that really boredom is the mother of creativity.

So we say that necessity is the mother of invention and you know it's one of those truisms that we all innately know to be true and I feel that boredom actually drives our creativity in a different way. So when I asked my dad, know, what happens when you get bored? And he said, well then I start thinking and I said, what happens when you start thinking? And he said, nothing. I said I don't think that's true and then he said actually it's not true.

He said actually I start to think about writing something or I start to he's written a few murder mystery dinner parties and he's got another one that he's starting to create and you know these are things that have come out of his own boredom. He's also written a book with a series of memoirs about his life and then made copies for our family to have a record of that and those things, my sense is that those things really came out of the fact that he had a lot of time on his hands and so therefore the urge to create was given space to breathe and eventually to come out into the world. So you know I really do think that my mum was far wiser than I realised at the time. I don't know if you can hear there's like a noise in the background I'm just going to double check and see if there's anything I can do to get rid of it. Investigations have yielded no answer so I'm really sorry if you can hear that in the background.

But anyway so my mum you know I've realised was far wiser than I knew she was at the time and isn't that always the way? You know there's that phrase about you know when I was a child I thought my mother knew everything, when I became a teenager I thought she knew nothing at all and now I'm an adult I realise that actually she knew far more than I could ever have known. And yeah, I just want to take a little moment to honour the wise people in our lives and really acknowledge the messages that they have shared with us that we may not have fully appreciated or fully understood even at the time and you know how wonderful it is when something really lands for us. One of the reasons why this memory of my mum came up was because so I've been traveling it's a long old journey from where I live into London and I've spent a lot of time on the tube, with an awful lot of other people travelling and I've been watching people on their phones and their headphones and you know if you've listened to the last few episodes you'll know that I've been really mindful about my own phone habit and so while I've been on the trains I've been really conscious about when I've picked my phone up, asking myself why I've picked my phone up, did I really need to look at the thing I was looking at and if I didn't then putting my phone back down again you know being consciously aware of my usage not using it by any means but being more consciously aware so I'm really curious as I look around me you might be too you know where you notice that you look down a tube train carriage and you see literally everybody is on their phone which is what happened to me.

Every single person apart from me was on their phone and then of course the horrible irony and hypocrisy of what I'm about to say is that then I picked up my phone and began writing down these thoughts. You know none of us are perfect But the reason why these thoughts appeared was because I'd allowed myself to get bored and my mind had begun to wander until it landed on these ideas. So it's a brilliant quote from Mark Twain who said the cure for boredom is curiosity and there is no cure for curiosity. Walter Benjamin who was a philosopher who managed to escape Germany in the 1940s but with a very untimely end, he once wrote boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. Isn't that beautiful?

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience and you know as I kind of researched who he was and you know some of his thinking you know what came through was that he saw boredom not as a negative state but as a state of mental relaxation which was absolutely necessary for reflection and processing and I think that was this overwhelming feeling that I had when I was sitting on this tube and then on subsequent tubes on you know every other day this week is when we don't allow ourselves to ever be bored whether it's us as an adult or our children we are really missing this opportunity to come into this mental state of relaxation or for me it feels like a kind of softening, sort of like an exhale of the mind where everything else starts to kind of drift open there's more space in our mind and therefore we can start to you know explore thoughts from different perspectives and you know maybe solve problems in a more creative way and you know and what is the risk to us if we're never allowing ourselves to be bored and this is a an idea that's been with me for quite some time and it's I quite often play with being bored.

Like so many of us I've got a very busy mind and what I have noticed is that busyness will often drive me into wanting to distract myself, whether that's you know returning to doing a piece of work even after I've decided I'll stop working for that day or you know picking up my phone or you know distracting myself in any other number of ways. But actually even just to mindfully let myself be bored for a short period of time generally results in something, some kind of creative output. So one of the things that I really love doing is lying in bed in the morning you know I wake up fairly early generally around kind of half five six but I don't get up then. There's a part of me that would really love to say get out of bed and I have this really beautiful morning but I don't. I really like lying in bed and you know those moments where you can feel the sun is just beginning to warm up the sky and you know light is just softly gaining in strength and the rest of the house is fast asleep and I can lie there you know in my quietness, in my quietude, you know some I can hear the birds because we always have the window open and I can hear a few bleats from the sheep in the valley and it, you know, it just feels really delicious and I know that there are innumerable wellness hacks and experts that tell us that how vital it is that we get up as soon as we wake up and you know I absolutely believe that that has huge value and I really love this time of drifting and for me it's when many of my ideas form and you know sometimes those ideas they dissipate like mist in the sunshine and sometimes they stay you know sometimes they take a richer form you know they take shape until maybe they become a podcast episode or in the case of my book All the ways I tell myself I love you they become you know this super clear idea of how to create this book which had been bobbing about in my head for months before and that in the end I wrote in a weekend after a lazy Sunday morning drift allowing myself to be bored, know, not distracting myself and you know I think there's something really interesting that when we constantly distract it's almost as though we're only really using one part of our brain, know, an important part and you know every aspect of our being is vital and important but it's not necessarily great for us to always be having this focused attention, this narrowed focused attention in on something you know particularly if that something is outside of us external to us and we need to be able to have this narrowed focused attention on things outside of us because that's often, you know, how we get things done you know it's that kind of like detailed bit of the brain, it's the focus bit of the brain.

But in his book 'Helping People Change' coaching with compassion for lifelong learning and growth Richard Boyatzis, I can never say his name properly and I do apologise Richard, with the other authors. They explore a really interesting downside of focus which is that when we're only in that focused state we don't then notice other things around us or other possibilities and therefore my premise or hypothesis is that that then means that we're not tapping into that part of us which is creative. So you know I think this is really interesting and maybe you find it interesting as well I feel it is important that we allow ourselves to be bored and referring back to what my mom said you know I think it's important that we allow our kids to be bored and also at times to offer up you know really like interesting toys and stimulus and education and engagement and play in order that they are able to be creative in other ways. But as we all know, know, that old classic thing where I don't know you buy a child fancy present and it's in a big fancy box and they take the thing out of the box and then play with the box.

That's real kind of creativity isn't it? Maybe that doesn't necessarily fit my argument about being bored but I like the idea of kids preferring to play with cardboard boxes anyway. So I think this also ties into the message that I often share about the importance of being with, you know, learning the ways in which what we're experiencing, what we're feeling, what we're thinking, what we're noticing around us. And maybe this concept of be bored is the flip side of be with or maybe they kind of slot into each other in some way. I haven't quite worked this out so you know bear with me.

Know sometimes when we're being with a situation it can be a bit boring you know your train is late and that means that you are not gonna or you risk not making the plane that you want to catch in order to go on holiday. That's a really stressful situation for so many of us and there's not a lot that we can do to control it unless you have the option of jumping in a taxi and getting them to take you to the airport. Not often an option for many of us so it becomes a beautiful environment where we can practice being with. You know being with this sense of frustration, the fear about what will happen if we do miss the plane, will we get our money back, know being with all of those thoughts and feelings. Maybe being with the fact that it's cold on the train station or that we aren't familiar with the train station where we're at so we've got to sort of manage all of those feelings as well.

And so as we settle into ourselves, into the being with, we might find that it all gets to be a bit boring or at least that might be what part of our self tells us and then that can become part of the practice. It's like oh okay so how is it if I allow myself to be bored here? How is it if I allow all my thoughts and feelings and attention to soften to such a degree that I can be with this sense of boredom and see what might emerge from this you know what creativity might emerge you know I think that's really delicious. These things that amuse me on train stations and I think often there can be a kind of fear of boredom. Our family system, maybe it comes from some kind of message that we've inherited that you must always be busy or that being bored must indicate in some way that you're being lazy because you're not getting up and getting on with something.

So that can be a really interesting point of reflection as well is like where might I have learned some of my stories about what it means to be bored and where I have learnt some of my strategies that I adopt in order to avoid being bored. You know whether that's you know looking at your phone, watching TV, addiction to work, know, endlessly chattering when really you if you read the room you'd know that silence might be something that was really valued. Where have we learned some of these strategies that push boredom to the edges? And I think it's one of the reasons why people often resist mindfulness and meditation because you know they say that their brain is too busy, it's too active as though and you know I've definitely said it myself so I am talking to a previous version of myself you know we sort of say this as though it's only our brain that works that way. When in fact really it's everyone's brain has the potential to be running at that kind of speed.

You know your brain will do it I suspect you know maybe my brain definitely does it and so that's why we call this compassionate self inquiry, this attention on the ways in which our brain thinks and what drives our behaviour and all of that. We called it the work because sometimes it is effortful to retrain our conditioned reactions to stimulus and form new neural pathways that help us remember how wonderful it is when we're not lost in the mire of our mind. You know either stuck in ruminations about the past diving forward into imaginings about the future but you know being willing to be in this moment and maybe to be bored you know what's what is the risk involved with boredom that could be another really lovely question to ask that might come up in Tuesday's thought actually I'll talk about Tuesday's thought a bit at the end of this as well. Know and being bored might involve a bit of rumination about the past you know we let our mind drift. It might involve a bit of that and it might involve a bit of imagining about the future but there's something rather marvellous I sense and I'm really happy to be challenged on this so if you've got different thoughts or there's something else you've read that reads differently from what I'm saying tell me I'd love to hear about it.

But I think there's something rather marvellous about consciously choosing boredom over distraction and that's really the essence of it I suppose. Know that conscious choice of boredom over distraction that can be a rather delicious experiment. Know and that's all any of this stuff is isn't it? It's something to play with. It's challenging ourselves and lifting ourselves out of that status quo, the patterned humdrum, ordinary way of thinking which is not bad and you know there is no reason, why anyone has to do this compassionate self inquiry but seeing as you're here listening to this podcast I'm guessing it's something that you're curious about and so you know how delicious to be curious about this as well to be curious about boredom I mean isn't that just like the best thing I love the juxtaposition of those two concepts you know oh I'm feeling a bit bored oh I wonder how that is like what is it what are the feelings what are the sensations what are the what's the resistance that I'm feeling to it and yeah it was interesting, mean it just after writing, know jotting down the thoughts that I've been stringing together, as I've been talking with you just now, I caught an Uber with the utterly wonderful Mohammed, my lovely lovely driver and oh he was so awesome and we talked about the power of the mind, we talked about the wisdom of boredom that was so great you know sharing some of these nascent thoughts with another human and getting their response and you know we talked about the importance of knowing yourself and it was really interesting actually engaging with someone else who'd been having quite similar thoughts but from a very different perspective and meeting together in the middle of this conversation.

When I left we shook hands with each other and had this really like gorgeous mutual respect for each other and of course if I'd been on my phone in the back of that taxi that would never have happened, but because I'd been thinking about boredom I had already made a mental note not to get my phone out while I was in the Uber and then ta da you know this beautiful conversation appears and that felt like a form of creativity. You know of course all interaction with another human is a form of creativity because you've never done it before. You're having a conversation that's never been had before. You're saying words in an order and in a way in a tone of voice and with a, you know, a sort of a pathway to them that's never been seen and will never be seen again. I mean, that's like ultimate creativity, isn't it?

Suppose something that's like poof, There it is. This beautiful thing and now it's gone, which reminds me of a mandala, of course. Oh, I've never had that thought before. That's like so every conversation is like its own mandala. You know, the words, the feelings, the ideas, the tone of voice, the people, you know, that are involved in the creation of that conversation and then, you know, it's like the Buddhist monks sweeping the sand away after creating the most exquisitely beautiful mandalas.

You know, it's kind of what happens when we have conversation. Gosh, wouldn't it be incredible if we were able to hold that thought, that concept in some way when we're in conversation with another person. I really love that. Maybe that resonates with you as well. I mean tricky to do all the time and I think that's the other thing really about so much of this deep work, this compassionate self inquiry is that it's not about you know we have to like always be like constantly mindful every single second of every single day because it's just not possible you know we are human beings and also there is life that is happening all around us and so you know there are times when we engage with that in ways that where this kind of mindfulness you know feels very hard to achieve and that's completely normal and absolutely okay And there are times maybe like this when listening to the podcast or during, you know sort of coaching if we've ever coached together or you've, considered coaching, together with me that we can really really sit together and explore and understand what it is that really you know drives your behaviours and leads you along the pathways that you choose in your life.

And you know these moments of mindfulness they're really important but we don't have to beat ourselves up if we're not always in this space. Know absolutely not. When we're here we're here. So I think overall my headline is you know here's to being bored and you know with deep love and respect to Mohammed you know and to everybody here listening you know and everyone that you love everyone you've ever had a beautiful conversation with or a beautiful interaction with you know here's here's to human connection and like not every, it doesn't always have to be beautiful, to be useful and important of course so just like let's not be judgy here let's just say here's to all human connection. Yeah.

Great. And I really hope this background noise hasn't been picked up by my mic and, it's not distracting you. But if it is, apologies for that. I sort of I wanted to, get the episode out for you rather than miss a week. So I briefly touched on Tuesday's thought and if you haven't yet seen it, it is this little experiment that I'm running at the moment.

Often at the end of, after, completing a podcast episode I'll finish recording, I'll do the minuscule bits of editing that I do because I like to include all of my mistakes and the sounds of Ronnie moving the furniture around in the stable and all of that as you probably know because that feels more authentic to me. Feels like you really are listening to the truth of what is going on and so after I've done all of that and I've you know set it all live and you know scheduled it and what have you. I often have some additional thoughts about the podcast and I often find myself thinking oh I don't know I really could have said this or I'm not sure about that thought now or oh I meant to say blah blah blah. So Tuesday's thought is really an opportunity for me to play a bit of catch up on new ideas that have emerged for me since doing the main podcast episode and it's a chance for me just to pose a point of reflection for you, something new that might further spark your own thoughts and my intention with these Tuesdays is that they last less than ten minutes, know, a little bonus episode, one for each, main episode of the podcast.

Just something a little delicious treat for your Tuesday morning. So have a listen if you haven't yet had a listen to last week's and let me know what you think and if you like it then we'll continue. I've already had some great bits of feedback and I really appreciate people's comments so thank you for that and also if you're listening on Apple Podcasts please do leave a review for the podcast. I don't often ask for this but it is so helpful for getting the podcast better known and I'm really on a mission to do this. I know that you guys, you lot are just awesome and wonderful and it's so beautiful to be in this space with you and I would really love us to be able to share this more widely.

I also know that so many of you already share it with people that you love and I really appreciate that. It's just so fabulous. If you haven't yet left a review, please do. I don't know if you can do it on Spotify and other podcast platforms but if you can please leave it on there too, on YouTube as well if you, listen on YouTube so that would be amazing. Yeah and also seeing as I mentioned about coaching you know this work that I do one to one with people it is really beautiful and it is deep but it is not heavy and if you're feeling like you're ready to start to do some of this deeper more reflective work or you've already done some and you want to return or you've revealed some layers through previous work maybe with me or with somebody else and you're ready to reveal what's the next layer down, then I would really love to work with you.

You know you already know me, you're listening here, maybe you've got a sense of what it might be like to work together and I would really love to have a listen to you actually and to see, what is it that you're looking for and what are the ways in which I could support you if I walked alongside you for a little while? And that's really how I see this compassionate self inquiry work, certainly this one to one work, is basically we walk alongside each other for a while and I will guide in whatever way feels most useful for you and support you as you find your way because your way will always be your way. No one else can ever tell you how you should travel or where you should travel to. I'm feeling very fond of you all right now. I don't know if you can hear it in my voice.

So I'm sending so much love and a hug and a wave.