I
f you were like most kids, you spent a lot of time waiting
and wishing.
On Mondays, you’d start waiting and wishing for Fridays.
About the time you got to school each day, you’d start waiting
and wishing for recess, and then lunch, and then the magic hour
of 3:00, time to go home. How much time did you spend staring at
the classroom clock, which moved impossibly slowly throughout
the day and even slower as 3:00 approached?
Along about Halloween, you started waiting and wishing for
Christmas. After Christmas, maybe you had a birthday to look
forward to, otherwise there was baseball season, and once base-
ball season finally arrived, the wait for summer vacation would
become all but intolerable.
After a few weeks of the endless, unstructured days of summer,
you may have caught yourself feeling twinges of something that
just might have been boredom. You might start wishing and wait-
ing for your family’s annual vacation, and long before you were
ready, it was time to go back to school.
Then the cycle of waiting and wishing started all over again.
Why Don’t Adults Get Bored?
It seemed like such a problem when you were a kid.
“Mom, I’m bored,” you’d whine.
Mom would suggest a list of a dozen or so of your favorite
activities, but you were tired of them all. She then might suggest