While walking in my neighborhood the other day, I came across a group of children accompanied by two young moms/adult chaperones. Around eight years-old, I guessed, they must be involved with some kind of summer day camp. Having come to a corner during what appeared to be a local outing, several kids plopped down on the grass. Some started small shoving games with each other. Others kept a close watch on their grown-up guides, waiting for instructions. I imagined – I could practically hear them sigh, “I’m bored.”

“I’m bored,” has often been a mantra sounded by young people. It’s one of the harshest pronouncements I can imagine. Categorizing oneself as bored amounts to the most direct kind of dissatisfaction with life I can think of. I don’t know when the very idea of being “bored” fell out of my vocabulary, but I can’t recall the last time I whined about not feeling engaged with what was happening in the moment.

Kids seem to want constant stimulation; play dates or blockbuster action flicks, interactive web sites to make learning more appealing (as if learning wasn’t exciting enough), or new online games that can pit their hand-eye coordination against those of a competing gamer in the Philippines. Some adults have similar addictions to stimulation or distraction. If they’re not doing something, or texting someone about what they’re doing, or making plans around the next thing they expect to do, they feel like losers.

So much has been written about the need for people to think of themselves as human beings instead of human doings. I don’t know that I can add much to the case for making the shift from being activity-oriented to simply being conscious except to contrast myself with the kids from this summer day camp.

I thrive in times where I have nothing to do, when there’s no place I have to rush off to or activity scheduled for my participation. With nothing to do, I just might take a walk, or follow the path of a butterfly, or, inadvertently remember the words to a song I was thinking about the night before. When I am not busy doing something, I am more apt to really listen to myself, so that when I do decide to do something it is something I really want to do and not just something to do to be busy. I am hardly ever bored. I am almost always grateful.

I never think of myself as being bored when I am not occupied with an activity. I think of myself as resting. Without propelling myself into action, when I feel at rest, I can more fully imbibe the pleasures of simply being – and that’s no small thing.