Why Wasting Time Isn’t Actually Wasting Time

Albert Einstein did it. So did Carl Jung. Mary Oliver could not live without it. And physicist Professor Alan Lightman just wrote a book on it. What is it exactly? It’s the practice of doing precisely nothing.

We’ve known for a while now that boredom is often the birthplace of creativity. It’s why parents are urged not to “over-schedule” kids and why Einstein used to go out on his boat a lot – a boat, by the way, that he couldn’t sail very well, and subsequently wound up lost in. But Einstein wasn’t interested in sailing so much as the meditative aspect of the waves, lapping against his boat, and the peaceful expanse of the sea.

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