My daughter Ella celebrated her eighth birthday yesterday.
When I was eight-years-old, I was a student at the Lancaster Waldorf school, the only school I’d known, and my day-to-day experience was not much different from my daughter’s. I went to school, I came home. I lived for the weekends, for summer. Even then, I recall my middle childhood as a time of profound boredom punctuated by rare shots of excitement.
I cannot say whether all young children share this experience. My son Owen seems to live a life of near-constant excitement or agitation, of ceaseless energy.
But Ella is much like me as a young child: She dwells in boredom.
Ella’s refuge, like everyone these days, is the screen: the games she plays on my iPhone, games like Minecraft and Roblox, which strike me, whenever I happen to look at the screen, as pointless and ugly.
Ella loves these games. Whenever she’s played for some time, I can see in her eyes the serene, drugged look of an addict at the peak of her high, and whenever I attempt to take the phone away she lashes out in uncharacteristic ways, crying with outrage.
It’s a terrible moment, when I force boredom upon her. Yet so often her boredom is generative, a space where imagination is made of necessity, where her own thoughts have the capacity to delight even in the midst of the most mundane of afternoons.
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| Bored |
Very often, of course, Ella’s boredom leads to an impulse to create.
In the coming weeks, we’ll all have to lean into boredom, and I suspect, as usual, that despite my intentions, I will end up looking to my young daughter for inspiration and succor–instead of the other way around.
Below is a sampling of the fruits of Ella’s boredom, beginning with her advice to herself for boredom…
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| You are bored so follow these rules: read, color, think, think about life, if you have enough time, watch something |
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| Screenplay: Written with Julia and Emma |
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| Ella filled each page of this tiny notebook with a tiny drawing |
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| Ella’s first book: Sad (from the “Feeling Series”) |
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| The protagonist (?) of Sad |
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| Five Bold Predictions for the Future: Balls will change, no more cars, new food, cool jobs, huge foods |