When was the last time you felt bored?

It's Christmas time. Normally, the end of the year always goes like this: you finish up your work for the year, all kinds of people want something from you, and at the same time you're thinking about home and the gifts and errands that still need to be done before Christmas. On top of that, it's best to clean and tidy up your home so you can start the new year fresh.

And then it's finally here: Christmas Eve. Everyone gets together, eats together, talks a lot, and exchanges gifts. This time always feels very unusual and special. Sometimes stressful, but at the same time cozy, warm, and comforting. It's one of my favorite times of the year.

Then the Christmas holidays are over and it happens: it's quieter than usual and you feel a bit caught between two stools. The world is calmer, work hasn't started yet, but you keep thinking about what's coming up. You don't really know what to do. I always have a long list that never gets any shorter, no matter how much I work through it—who hasn't been there? There's always a lot to do, but now it's time for vacation and a break. Your body longs for it, and you can feel it. If only your restless mind weren't there.

So my question to you is: When was the last time you felt bored?

I recently replied to a friend's Christmas card and wrote that my goal was to feel bored in the days after Christmas and only then, once I had achieved that, to start working again. And yes, I mean that seriously.

For me, boredom means being so relaxed that my body automatically looks for something new and feels like tackling something again. And not because I have to, but because of an inner need.

I firmly believe that we humans are not made to do nothing. Activity is a basic need for us, just like meaningfulness. Just hanging around always sounds tempting, but it won't feel good in the long run. I'd like to tell you briefly about an encounter I had:

I remember Chris, an American I met on a flight to Indonesia this year. He had everything you could imagine, including a boat. A dream life, you might say. He was an airline captain and quit his job in his 40s. But what I clearly sensed was that he didn't really know what he wanted to do with his life now. His travels, his money, and even his boat didn't seem to fulfill him. On the contrary, there was a palpable emptiness and a need for meaning. That made me a little sad and made me realize how important it is to have some kind of plan or an inner drive in a certain direction.

When I observe my surroundings, I notice time and again how much everyone is in “next comes this” mode. We often think in terms of to-do lists, and ticking off the individual items determines our everyday life and its sequence. At least that's how I often feel. As soon as you've done one thing, the next one comes along, and then the next, and the next, and so on. It's actually a bottomless pit.

My wish would be to relax so much between Christmas and New Year's Eve, or even at the beginning of the new year, and to clear my head so much that I feel bored again and can then start the new year fully motivated and with lots of energy. Because I have a lot planned.

We underestimate the power of “emptiness.” No, we don't just underestimate emptiness, we usually fear it. And I don't mean a lack of something, but rather the space we create. New things always need space, and we hardly give ourselves that space anymore these days. It has become increasingly difficult to find it with all the daily social media consumption with LinkedIn, Instagram, and messengers like WhatsApp, and 20 emails a day. The buzzword for this is “mental load.” I would even call it overload. Our brains are now so intensely stimulated that we experience withdrawal symptoms as soon as we spend 10 minutes away from our cell phones. We are programmed to consume. And what we do is actually just organize ourselves around it, instead of really determining where our path is leading.

Having space to think and pause has become a unique luxury. I know of nothing that gives us more strength than allowing and nurturing it. Without silence and clarity, we lose ourselves again in the new year in our often externally determined activities. An invitation to you to perhaps start the new year in a completely different way, as we were able to do quite naturally as children!

When was the last time you felt bored? Can you even remember? How long did it usually last? How did you feel afterwards? What came out of it? How could you recreate those conditions today? What would have to go? And what could come in?