When the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler was bored one day, back in 1871, he complained to his mother.
“Mom, there’s nothing to do around here. And also, I’m tired of living in a house where all the walls and drapes and furniture are gray.”
His mother, not the excitable type — and overly fond, perhaps, of shapeless black dresses — calmly suggested that James busy himself with some old paintbrushes, as a way to keep his mind occupied.
“Make a painting? That sounds even more boring,” James whined. “Unless maybe I had a nude model.”
His mother had a slightly different suggestion.
As it turns out, most of the famous paintings that we think of as ‘iconic’ were created out of artistic boredom. No one who actually had a life would spend 40 hours painting a picture of his mother, fully clothed, sitting in a gray living room.
But it’s not only visual artists who eventually bring out the old paintbrushes to fight off boredom. History teaches us that almost all of the world’s so-called ‘great’ musical compositions resulted from periods of monotony, while this or that musician was waiting around for the next little prince or princess to show up for their piano lesson.
Beethoven? Bored, with time on his hands. Mozart? Had nothing better to do. Chopin? Spent all day tickling the ivories so he didn’t have to wash the dishes.
And all those famous scientific discoveries… none of them would have happened, except that people were knocking around in the laboratory, listlessly, trying to somehow relieve the tedium.
Outrageously hilarious humor columns here in the Daily Post? Enough said.
The lesson here is, boredom is your friend.
I was exposed to this important lesson when I was bored last week, and looking for escape. And not having a piano or laboratory or old paint brushes at hand, I did the only thing I could think of. I surfed the Internet…
…and found a fascinating article by Dr. Nereida Gonzalez-Berrios, MD, Certified Psychiatrist, posted to TheMindFool.com
The article is titled, “500 Thing to Do When Bored”.
It actually does include 500 thing to do. Obviously, Dr. Gonzalez-Berrios was incredibly bored, and the only thing she could think to do, was make a list of 500 things to do when you’re bored.
A fair number of the suggestions could possibly be undertaken even if you were not bored. But maybe not.
- Learn a new language that was in the cards for long
- Watch your favorite movie again and again
- Enjoy a warm sunbath early in the morning
- Make a playlist of your favorite songs from last year
- Get into a cleaning spree around the house
- Play video game with your child…
I was not bored enough to read the entire list. Nor am I bored enough to ‘learn a new language’. I would need to be really, really bored, before I would try to learn a new language, no matter how long it had been in the cards.
Watch my favorite movie, over and over? Now, that appealed to me. In fact, that’s exactly what I did yesterday, when I was bored.
But judging by the first six items in the psychiatrist’s list, I suspected that “Compose the Ninth Symphony” or “Paint a Famous Masterpiece” or “Invent the Telephone” was not going to be included among the suggestions.
Perhaps we’ve been setting our sights too low.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.