All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 1654

Most of us think of boredom as a kind of moral defect, something to be avoided at all costs. Boredom feels like a cousin to laziness – a malaise that is unproductive and debilitating, especially at work. But what if an occasional encounter with boredom is one of the greatest gifts life can give us?

As schoolchildren we learn a lot about biology, history, and math, but little if anything about how to respond skillfully to those silent invitations to self-awareness, those moments when we find ourselves “sitting quietly in a room alone,” as Pascal puts it. Daniel Goleman has identified self-awareness as the foundation of emotional intelligence, a set of skills essential for personal and professional success. Taking Goleman’s cue, then, I’ve been trying to reframe boredom as life’s way of signaling to me that it’s time to slow down. It’s a chance for me to become more reflective, more self-conscious – in particular, to take note of my habitual striving to measure up to others’ expectations. I now try to view boredom as a chance to catch my breath and imagine how to move my life forward in a way that’s more aligned with my own moral compass.

Easier said than done. Boredom makes me edgy and anxious. That’s because when things get quiet, I find myself forced to confront parts of myself I find distasteful. When I’m working and busy, it’s easy to sweep these unpleasant reminders of my personal failures out of awareness so that I don’t have to deal with the ensuing discomfort. Later, though, when boredom visits, these knots of repressed energy resurface. At this point my habit is to search for some distraction – any distraction – to avoid the anxiety of acknowledging these less than positive facets of my self. Now the challenge is to resist the temptation to pull out my phone, scroll through the news, or check my email as a way of diverting attention away from my boredom – while at the same time, of course, missing a chance for greater insight.

It’s not surprising that some of the most successful, self-aware professionals I know are people who have found ways of celebrating, rather than condemning, moments of boredom in their lives. They relax into, rather than resist, their boredom. They welcome boredom for what it is – a brief time-out, a chance to take stock of where they’ve been and where they’re headed, an opportunity to catch their breath and simply be in the midst of all their doing. They’ve figured out that honoring moments of boredom is a valuable practice that can help them realize the best lives they might imagine for themselves.

Today, working from home in the midst of global health, economic, and social crises, we no longer have the same easy access to many of the distractions we’ve employed in the past to avoid whatever we find distasteful about ourselves. That’s good news, given the urgent need for us to reexamine our own deeply held assumptions about the world in which we live and our relationship with others who live in this same world but are different. Never before has the creativity of the human spirit and honest self-awareness been in such demand and short supply – which is why now is the perfect time for us to rethink our relationship with boredom, and to celebrate boredom as a gift that can bring us closer to ourselves.