"I'm bored." Maybe the answer to boredom is to be bored

"I'm bored." I have heard this approximately 7,239 times over the summer holidays. I've heard it on a beach in Greece. In the hour between two activities specifically organised to ensure there was something to do. At home surrounded by approximately 400 things that could theoretically be played with. At times when I have literally just spent quite a lot of money making sure nobody was bored.

My response, which may come down from mother, is always the same: "Only boring people are bored, go and find something to do."

I've got a niggle, and the more I mutter this phrase, the more i'm feeling it is that this is the wrong way of looking at it.

Maybe the answer to boredom isn't to find something to do. Maybe it's to be bored.

We live in an age where there is almost no reason to ever have an unoccupied brain. There is always something to watch, scroll, listen to, read, play, reply to or buy. I can fill the three minutes waiting for the kettle to boil without even consciously deciding to.

We've become incredibly good at filling the gaps, to the point where I'm not sure there are actually many gaps left. In the same way we fill our calendars back to back, we've started doing the same thing with our brains.

Yet..... and this is the bit that is making me question my potentially flawed parenting advice. Some of my best ideas and thought have arrived when I've been in a state of doing nothing and probably a bit bored. Walking somewhere when I've forgotten my headphones, staring out of a window on a train with no wifi signal, in the shower, lying on a beach when my Kindle and phone had run out of battery.

It's what happens when my brain is allowed to wander rather than constantly being given something else to consume. I think we, and I very much use the royal we here, have developed an inability to tolerate boredom. Dare I say that maybe we've even become a little scared of it.

Boredom isn't really empty is it. It's the moment when there's nothing else competing with your thoughts, which means you might actually have to sit with them. I can only speak of myself here but when I finally do, it's quite often followed by an annoying realisation about something I've been avoiding, something that isn't quite right or something I know I need to do something about. It's really painful.

So whilst I jump to productivity and action, maybe when I need to be teaching and modelling is the ability to sit with the uncomfort of silence and nothing to do. Although if I hear "I'm booooooored" for the 7,240th time this summer holiday, I reserve the right to completely ignore everything I've just written.