What feeds the imagination? Sometimes….NOTHING. Here’s a Letter to the Editor I wrote, printed (wheee!) in the Sunday edition of the NYTimes this past spring. It was in response to an article by Pamela Paul:
To the Editor:
Re “Let Children Get Bored Again” (Sunday Review, Feb. 3):
Thank you to Pamela Paul for her piece on the importance of boredom. One of the few constants on my middle-school classroom bulletin board over the years has been Maira Kalman’s New Yorker cover featuring the Institute for Advanced Study of Daydreaming. The sage advice of Lorraine Hansberry has remained above my whiteboard for almost two decades now: “Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.”
Life rushes us too much, yet so much of value is born of the interstitial pause. It’s become almost sacred to me. There’s a reason I stave off a smartphone. I fear it would assert itself, like a tour director, over the flights of fancy born of the nonspecifically occupied mind. If you sit with your own thoughts for a while, you never know where you may end up. And that’s a good thing, for all of us.