On Saturday I received an email from a Grade 7 Clementine who wanted to share a TED Talk by Mamoush Zomorodi that she had found while on a homework break. The talk, entitled How Boredom Can Lead to Your Most Brilliant Ideas, was great; however, I appreciated this Clementine’s take even more- that “it was super and so relevant to our time and age.”
Ms Zomorodi’s premise in her talk is that we are so tied to our phones and screens that we are losing our opportunities for boredom. Boredom, she says, leads to creative ideas. Zomorodi reflects on her time as a young mother with a colicky child when she walked and walked to soothe her son. Once the fuzziness of new motherhood and tiredness ebbed, she realized just how creative and thoughtful she became with time to be bored or to ‘wonder.’ Zomorodi created a Bored and Brilliant exercise and challenged people to step away from their phones for a time.
One only has to be in a line up at the grocery store, or travelling on buses, planes or trains to note the very few people who are not staring at screens. I know I have increasingly had to tear myself away from my Twitter stream or Instagram and have become aware of the substantial time I spend going from article to article and post to post.
While I smiled at the irony of this young Clementine discovering the TED Talk when she was taking a break, I am happy that she found it, and even happier that it struck her as really important. As adults, we have a key role in limiting screen time and in modelling appropriate use of devices. However, our girls have an even more important role, as they are often better positioned to influence peer behavior.
It is my hope that we might see some ‘bored but brilliant’ times at St. Clement’s!
