I often say that boredom is important for the creative process. When you get bored your brain starts coming up with stuff to entertain you. That stuff is often art.
Recently I have been thinking that boredom is an indicator of something else though. Our neurons bundle more tightly the more we follow the same train of thought. Repetition. Neurons that fire together wire together. Maybe boredom is an indicator that we are following the same trains of thought too much. Maybe boredom is an indicator that we need to change our thoughts, our approach, and our story so we can solve our problems in new ways.
I grew up in Connecticut. I believe it's a symptom of the long, cold winters there that I emphasize delaying satisfaction, working hard, following through, sticking with it, and putting my nose to the grindstone. This work ethic has probably helped me a lot in life. I don’t abandon projects when they get difficult: I grind through them.
But I wonder if the other side of this quality is a practice of sticking with an approach long after it has proven to be ineffective. What have I continued to do, repetitively, expecting and hoping that if I do it long enough, it’ll pay off eventually? When I look at my art/dance company Capacitor, I see that I have survived. I see that I have made a ton of creative work - ten full-evening shows of original bespoke content. I see that I stayed in relatively the same place…making fringe work for fringe audiences. What would have happened if I tried radically different approaches? What will happen as I try radically different things - approach different audiences and industries and open my mind to the unfamiliar?
In my early career, I simply had to actualize some ideas. I had to create something in the world, outside of my mind, that I could share. Now, I have a lot of this material. Can I play with it, now that it exists, and see where the most gracious audience lies for this particular offering?
The psychedelic experience shows us that there is a lot of room…room to do things in different ways, room to move about in the world. Our narrow constricted habits bore us for a reason.