Today is our first day of summer. I have our summer chore charts already hanging on the wall in hopes of healthy summer rhythms. My kids are excited that play lie ahead. The school year closed with more of a whimper than a bang.
One of my trio bombed these COVID home schooling weeks academically. It may be a bigger comment on how drastically the emotional burden of social isolation weighs down on an intellectual metric of a 4.0 GPA. This might be what childhood depression looks like.
In hopes of a changing tide and an aggressive affront to numbing out our family is going to be practicing boredom this summer. Daily, we will sit unplugged from screens, void of entertainment, even physically still. It’s for me as much as for my not-so-little littles.
Dr Caroline Leaf says we are sabotaging the beauty and life of our brains by not letting them process and imaging through boredom. We overstimulate and consequeantly, underproduce. We need at least 16 minutes of stillness. If you aren’t familiar with the good neuroscientist, spare yourself a moment and indulge on her Ted Talk.
So we begin- our summer of saying yes to living in the fruits of boredom, the physiological creation on memory, the bounty of nothing, and invitation of imagination.
Practicing Yes 