Don’t be afraid to be still and do nothing

School’s out for summer!

Congratulations students, teachers and parents. You’ve made it to the end of another long academic year. So now what?

I hope you will spend the summer doing a whole lot of nothing. For once, graduates, there are no summer reading lists to worry about and as awesome as college will be, it isn’t a cakewalk. Let the stress come when it must. If you spend every day in bed staring at the ceiling, you get no judgment from me.

In the quiet “nothing” moments, we learn who we are and what we are passionate about. And inevitably, we start doing something more meaningful than most any assignment.

Unfortunately, students have less and less “nothing” time these days. A packed summer is a burden put on them by their schools, but also by their parents. We seem determined to expose kids to every activity and camp under the sun. The thought of letting them sit around and do nothing is too terrible to bear. And if we are honest, we keep ourselves so busy that we can’t conceive of keeping the rest of the family on a slower schedule. But what does that mean for the kids?

I don’t know if you can testify, but boring childhood summers are some of my most memorable on record. I remember going to visit my grandma in New York for a couple of weeks every summer as a tween. Grandma would cook like nobody’s business, but she wasn’t driving us to Times Square or the Empire State Building. We got to play in her backyard…morning after morning after morning.

The backyard, essentially devoid of toys or anything resembling them, became the setting for all of my creative pursuits. I starred in my own music videos with the help of my Discman. I played tag with my cousins. I wrote my first love stories, imagining that the pre-teen boy next door had an intense crush on me and was watching me through the window anytime I was outside.

And when I couldn’t bear the yard anymore, I would sit in the same room my mother grew up in and deeply examine the wallpaper, the closet, the wall hangings, the stuffed animals. I imagined her at my age, sitting around in that same room; my imagination ran wild.

There is no doubt that those days helped shape me into the creative writer I became. In fact, these lazy, mysterious summer days come to mind often when I sit before a script. There was a beautiful stillness and a tangible curiosity in those trips. I had nowhere to go, almost nothing to do, and I cannot forget one moment.

We cannot be afraid to be still and do nothing. It is the basis of creative thinking. We have to be countercultural enough to let our children do nothing this summer, even for a time. Take away the tablet. Put the cable box in the closet. Give them a chance to free play with the most incredible computers they have: their brains.

Natalia Naman Temesgen is an independent contractor. Contact her at nntemesgen@gmail.com.

This story was originally published May 20, 2016 at 5:52 PM with the headline "Don’t be afraid to be still and do nothing."