The Beauty of Boredom - Part 2

In the last journal, I wrote about my relationship with boredom and how I’ve come to understand it differently. For most of my life, I didn’t believe there was room for idle time because there was always something I should be doing. Even when I began to value it, I treated boredom as a luxury that had to be earned after long hours of work. As I’ve moved deeper into a creative journey, that framing no longer holds.

For the past 7 years I’ve been an independent business owner, working from home on most days. I’m responsible for my own productivity and I have total freedom with my time. There have been many days where my calendar was empty and I didn’t have anything to do.

Eventually, I gave myself permission to embrace the slow days and sit in stillness to see where it led. To my surprise, it opened up a hunger and motivation to learn and grow in ways that made me feel like a youth again. I had to understand what was actually happening inside my mind.

As I allow myself to get bored, I feel the noise in my head settle as thoughts stop competing for attention. My mind drifts towards reflecting on the past or imagining what might come next. If I’m not prepared for that shift, it feels uncomfortable and I fight the urge to reach for my phone or any stimulation to resolve the tension. But when I stay with the mental drift, my attention gradually settles into stillness.

If I stay with that state long enough, something else begins to form. Ideas that have been sitting unresolved for days or weeks resurface without effort. Life experiences that felt random and separate begin to relate to one another.

My experience with meditation helped me recognize this pattern more clearly. I’ve practiced for many years, long before I connected it to creativity or problem-solving. I initially approached it as a way to manage stress rather than as a creative practice. Over time, it taught me how to sit with restlessness and allow thoughts to move through my mind without interference. Gradually I built trust in my ability to let my thinking organize itself.

Through that practice, I began to notice that stillness wasn’t the end of the process. When I resisted the impulse to interrupt or extract meaning too quickly, my thinking often shifted into a deeper state. Instead of ideas arriving as fragments, they began to feel more connected, as if coherence was forming on its own timeline rather than mine.

I notice a similar pattern when I go on walks without music or distraction. Walking gives my mind room to do what it already seems inclined to do. The movement keeps my body just engaged enough to quiet my instinct to manage every thought. Over time, ideas begin to assemble in the background, and I usually only recognize what has come together once I return to my work.

This practice now guides my business and how I develop concepts for art installations or ideas for Creators Creed. When I begin forming a new idea, I gather inspiration broadly through stories, books, films, and lived experience, without trying to impose structure too early. I consume voraciously until I feel saturated, trusting that my brain is storing and processing the information in the background. Then I step back and give my mind time, sometimes days or weeks. When I’m ready to search for meaning and understanding, I create space by taking a walk or sitting in stillness. Once I’m able to cross that threshold, patterns surface, often revealing insights that feel less like invention and more like recognition.

Thanks to boredom, I’ve had time to reflect on my past and connect the dots with these recurring experiences. When I look back at those long summers in Texas or the hours spent sitting with unfinished ideas, I no longer see wasted time. I don’t feel guilty for not filling every moment with something productive. What can look idle from the outside has often been where the most meaningful work was happening. Recognizing that has reshaped how I think about creativity, productivity, and how work actually takes form. This is how boredom has shaped my creative process. I’m interested in how it shows up for you and what starts to take shape when you give it room.