On Boredom and the Cello

At the end of my last post, I mentioned a third option. One that screens have eliminated. It starts with letting your child have nothing to do. Completely unstructured time.

Because practicing Happy Farmer for the fifteenth time, when it still isn’t quite right, asks for exactly the same thing as sitting on a Tuesday afternoon with nothing to do: the ability to stay when nothing too interesting is happening yet.

Many children struggle with practice because the world they’re growing up in doesn’t ask them to wait very long for anything.

Society Is Allergic to Boredom

Modern life treats boredom, or unscheduled time, as a problem to be solved. A gap to be filled. The moment a child says “I’m bored,” our instinct is to fix it. Hand them something. Schedule something. Turn something on. And I understand the impulse. It’s one that I battle myself.

Many of you have seen me at Crown Mountain Park. When the days get longer, I walk long distances there, usually twelve to twenty miles. It’s a mile loop with nothing particularly interesting to look at. About half the time, I leave the headphones at home. Those silent walks are where some of my most creative and self-reflective thinking has happened: working through student challenges, musical problems, and plenty of things that have nothing to do with work at all.

What began as physical discipline is now something I look forward to for what it reliably produces.

That kind of thinking only happens if the space is left empty.

One Student Noticed

One of my high school students just got back from an eleven-day class trip. No phone access. No feeds, no notifications, no background noise on demand. No Duolingo streak reminder. When he came back, he told me time felt different. Slower. Fuller. He noticed things. He thought about things. He said he hadn’t felt that way in a long time.

And because of that experience, he was scrolling less now that he had access to his phone. Trying to hold onto that feeling.

His current piece improved while he was away, too.

Thinking Needs Silence

When external input drops, the mind doesn’t go quiet. It gets louder, more vivid. Unresolved things surface. Ideas that had no room to form start to take shape. This can be uncomfortable at first, which is exactly why most people reach for their phone within minutes of sitting still.

But if you stay there long enough, something shifts. The agitation settles. What replaces it is harder to name: a kind of thinking that doesn’t happen on demand. Daydreaming that turns purposeful. Memory that surfaces uninvited. Connections between things that had seemed unrelated. This is how meaning gets made, and how learning consolidates.

Insight tends to arrive in the shower, in the middle of the night, or in my case, on a long walk. The mind finally has room.

What This Means for the Cello

Real practice is not particularly exciting, especially at first. It looks like repetition: building the same bow hold, the same posture, the same measure, slowly enough that improvement has time to occur. Part of my job is to introduce methods that reduce that monotony and expand a student’s toolkit. But regardless of how creatively we approach it, much of this still feels like boredom before it feels like progress.

A child who doesn’t endure regular boredom arrives at the instrument without the one thing early practice demands most: the willingness to stay when nothing feels like it’s happening. That’s often what parents are seeing when a student rushes through repetition, skips difficult measures, or shuts down when progress isn’t immediate. It’s not always a motivation problem. It’s an attention tolerance problem. This is also why practice charts, sticker charts, and progress trackers matter more than they might seem. When improvement is invisible to the ear, a physical record makes it real.

Students who have practice being bored tend to stay with hard passages longer, tolerate slow improvement, and generate their own solutions. Part of my teaching brings me to a Waldorf school, and I’ve noticed this firsthand. Children accustomed to unstructured time, and a near-total absence of small screens, tend to arrive at the instrument already knowing how to wait. The difference compounds over time.

Final Thought

The cello asks for one thing above all else: the ability to stay. Before playing becomes expressive, it is mechanical. Before progress becomes audible, it is invisible.

The ability to stay with something difficult is a skill, and like every skill, it has to be built somewhere.

Boredom is where that practice begins.