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How’s your week been? Busy? Restful? A healthy mix of both? Without knowing who you are and when you’re reading this I’d hazard a guess that your response is more likely to be busy than restful. I say this because as a society, we are increasingly donning busyness as a badge of honour. To be clear, I have no doubt that most of us lead busy lives thanks to our contractual, financial and familial obligations. However, there is an increasing need for us as individuals to appear busy, partly because busy people are perceived as high-status, important, upstanding members of society. After all, nobody wants to be thought of as the lazy bum who impinges and feeds off the system but doesn’t contribute to it. 

I get it. Sometimes I feel the need to play into this perception, especially in the workplace. After all, I wouldn’t want to give my colleagues or our bosses the impression that I’m not pulling my weight, so when asked “How’s it going?” or “How are you?” at the start of a work call or meeting,  I often hear myself defaulting to something along the lines of “ugh, crazy busy”, irrespective of what my schedule is like.

The thing is, I can't help but feel like all this is antithetical to what I consider to be a good life, one with art and creativity at its centre. And it's not just me. Scholars and social commentators alike lament the loss of unstructured independent play in childhood. It’s not just a problem for kids, but one for adults too. We feel the need to fill every waking moment with something to do, to feel productive, or else to keep up with the ongoings in the world via our glowing screens. But you know what happens when we don’t create the space to let our minds wander, to sit with our thoughts for a moment, to be bored? We’re less likely to be imbued with the ideas we need to pursue, which essentially means we don’t get to make the art we’re best positioned to make. This is unfortunate, but don’t take my word for it, take it from Neil Gaiman and Albert Einstein, two of the most prominent leaders in art and science of the last century. 

“The best way to come up with new ideas is to get really bored.” - Neil Gaiman

 “Creativity is the residue of time wasted.” - Albert Einstein

While I’m all for advocating for free, unstructured time, I feel the need to introduce a caveat here, because as I write this, I can’t help but feel privileged to have the option to cosplay busyness as opposed to being up to one’s neck with unavoidable and mandatory tasks, activities, and jobs. It isn’t lost on me that someone somewhere is juggling three jobs to make ends meet, leaving them with hardly any time to engage in the cognitive and mental processes needed to be creative and make art. This makes me both thankful to be in the position I’m in, but also sad that many in society don’t enjoy the same privileges, the upshot being that I mourn all the wonderful art we’re potentially missing out on as a society as a result.

So what to do? Honestly, I’m not sure. I do know that I (and perhaps others in similar positions) need to make a conscious effort to jettison this idea that we should strive to fill our days with anything and everything to appear as busy as possible. Downtime is good, unstructured time is good, and as I’ve previously argued, boredom is good.

P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.

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