In defence of an unoccupied mind

I was halfway through putting on my shoes when I realised I had already chosen what podcast to listen to.

I was only taking the dog for his usual morning walk. Twenty minutes, perhaps thirty if every interesting bush and piece of long grass required a full investigation! Yet the prospect of leaving the house without a podcast, some music or a voice in my ears felt odd. As though the walk needed an additional layer before it counted as properly used time.

In the end I left the headphones behind.

For the first few minutes, my mind behaved like I’d arrived late to a meeting. Rushing from one unfinished thought to the next: an email I hadn’t got around to answering yet, something I should have said differently, a thing I had seen online and was meant to look into (but didn’t really need to). Just a lot of noise.

Then, gradually, it became a little slower.

I thought about the shape of a roof. I remembered a sweet shop that used to be on a street I have not seen for years. I wondered whether dogs experience the same walk as repetition or whether the world is made new each morning by smell. None of these thoughts was useful.

I have become used to treating an unoccupied mind as a small problem requiring immediate attention. A queue, a train platform, even the time it takes for a kettle to boil can be filled before it has properly begun. The phone is always nearby with something ready: a message, a headline, a short-form video, another person’s thought arriving fully formed.

Much of this is enjoyable. I like podcasts. I like music. I am not planning to rediscover boredom by making ordinary life devoid of all technology. But I am beginning to notice the difference between choosing to listen and being unable to leave a space unfilled.

Boredom has a poor reputation because, from the outside, it looks like nothing. There is no measurable progress. No evidence that the time has been improved. Yet the mind does not become empty when external input stops. It wanders, rearranges, returns to old material and occasionally connects things that had been sitting far apart.

Some of that wandering is uncomfortable. Given a little room, the mind does not always produce positive thoughts. It can rehearse anxieties, it can return to embarrassing moments from 2009 as if an urgent review had just been requested. Silence is not automatically peaceful.

Still, I am not sure peace is the only thing an unoccupied mind is for.

Perhaps it is also where we discover what has been waiting beneath the more convenient thoughts. A vague feeling becomes clear enough to name. An idea develops without being summoned. Or nothing particularly important happens, and the mind is simply allowed to move at its own pace.

There is a temptation to turn even this into a method: twenty minutes of scheduled boredom, tracked carefully, followed by a note about the results. I know this because part of me would enjoy buying the notebook for it! But that would give the empty space another job.

I need to remember to leave some of it unclaimed.

On the walk, the dog stopped beside a gate and looked through it for longer than seemed reasonable. Usually I would have used the pause to check my phone, or encourage him along. Instead, I stood there too. Cows grazing in the field moved; birds flew overhead. Somewhere in one of the bushes an unknown animal scurried about. My thoughts went nowhere worth recording.

After a while, the dog moved on, and so did I.

The walk had not made me more productive or revealed a hidden answer. But I rather like that.