The week between Christmas and New Year’s, aka “Dead Week,” is one of my favorites of the year. It’s an automatic vacation week for me, but even when it wasn’t, I still loved the unstructured, liminal feel of it. There’s little, if anything to do, and I relish that since there’s usually so much to do the other 51 weeks of the year.
I had a different experience this year. Every time I tried to savor that lack of activity, my mind instead wanted to find something to do. It wouldn’t let me relax. Since I tend to write my December blog posts a month or two in advance, blogging wouldn’t be the answer. I did my other usual daily things like journaling, reading, and watching movies, but none of that satiated me.
I was bored. I don’t usually get bored during this week, but this time I was.
A similar thing happened to me last year, which I took as inspiration to start writing Mirrobius. But I didn’t feel quite ready to tackle another book project just yet.
My family has recently been re-watching Sherlock, the BBC’s modern take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective. In the show, one of Sherlock’s primary reasons for taking any case is how interesting or out of the ordinary it seems. He dismisses many cases as too boring. He needs to feel as intellectually stimulated as possible.
When Sherlock is in between cases, his sense of boredom causes him to spiral into reckless forms of experimentation. He chases that stimulation in extreme ways when he can’t focus on what he really prefers to be doing. So he’ll draw targets on his wall and shoot at them without looking, or examine human heads he stores in his freezer. He hardly ever seems to enjoy these activities, he’s just trying to fill the hours until another novel case presents itself.
I wouldn’t recommend the exact activities presented in the show, but I think Sherlock is nevertheless onto something that those finding themselves slipping into boredom can learn from.
It was recently put to me that boredom can be reframed as an opportunity to try something new. If none of the usual things seem appealing or satisfy that antsy feeling, one could instead reach beyond the typical activities one relies on to do something different. Doing so will engage the brain with a novel, unpredictable feeling and (hopefully) engage it in the manner it craves.
I’ve been noticing this for myself already. Recently, when I haven’t felt like writing in my journal, I’ve taken to doing something artistic in it instead: drawing, doodling, scribbling, using colored brush pens or markers instead of my usual pen, something that gives my right brain a little more to do than my left. I think it’s a way my subconscious is already doing what this reframing suggests.
I’m still exploring what seeing boredom as an opportunity means or how best to do it for myself, but I think I’m on the right track. Now that I’m back to having to write regular blog posts and record podcast episodes, I’m able to hold that creative boredom at bay. But I’ll hopefully be better prepared for this year’s Dead Week, and other times as well.
Jeffrey A. Nelson 