Stop Over-Scheduling Your Joy: How to Create Space for Boredom and Presence

Listen to Episode 37: Stop Over-Scheduling Your Joy: How to Create Space for Boredom and Presence

We live in a culture that treats open space on the calendar as a problem to be solved. Whether it's filling every afternoon with activities or even "scheduling time to do nothing," we often find ourselves so busy that we forget how to simply be. In this episode, Blaze challenges the urge to over-schedule our joy and explores the lost art of boredom.

She dives into the difference between helpful structure and harmful saturation, sharing how she reclaimed her morning routine by lowering the bar and embracing imperfection. Blaze argues that the most meaningful moments in life aren't the ones we meticulously plan, but the unscripted interactions and quiet observations that happen when we slow down. If you feel like you're running a race just to stay in the same place, this conversation is your invitation to stop, breathe, and let your life unfold at its own pace.

🌿 In this episode we explore:

• Why we feel anxious when our calendars are open and how to reframe "empty space" as a gift.
• The lost art of boredom and why it is essential for creativity, awe, and inspiration.
• How to distinguish between helpful structure and harmful saturation in your daily life.
• Why we often avoid nourishing activities (like Qigong or reading) in favor of distractions (like scrolling).
• Practical strategies for reclaiming the first hour of your day without rushing or perfectionism.
• The power of doing things "imperfectly" and allowing yourself to slow down while you do them.
• How to trust that your children (and others) can handle your time for yourself without falling apart.
• Why the most "full" moments of life are often unscripted, not the ones on your calendar.
• How to stop rushing through your "fun" just to check a box and start actually enjoying the process.
• The freedom of realizing you don't need to maximize every moment to have a meaningful life.

Hello, my friends. Let's talk about how we can enjoy our lives without over-scheduling it to death.

I think that one of the biggest traps that I've fallen into just in being a human being living in America. Let's just call it that.

Is that as soon as there's an open space on my calendar, it feels like it shouldn't be that open, and I kind of want to fill it with something.

So if it isn't filled with work, then what am I doing in my afternoons or evenings? And if I'd have a weekend that's fully open, how am I going to spend that weekend?

And perhaps it's human nature that we all kind of want to figure it out in advance. And certainly for me, I find it extremely regulating to know what's coming and what I can expect.

And if I don't know what's going to happen, sometimes I can be anxious or worried about it or like afraid that someone else is gonna commandeer my time or make me do something that I don't wanna do.

So sometimes maybe having a full calendar equates to safety for me in this weird way.

But I also find that when every single moment is spoken for and I feel like I have to do something at every scheduled time in my day or on my weekends.

There comes a point where I start to be angry all the time, and like there's just not enough space for me to be me.

And I think there's been like this modern movement that is about scheduling free time or scheduling space because we're like that obsessed with scheduling things that we now have to schedule time to not do shit. And isn't that remarkable because I say that I'm like, "Oh my god, we actually do this all the time." It's like schedule time. Make sure you have enough time to do nothing. I'm like...

How is it that we possibly don't have enough time to do nothing? And yet, I look out at the busyness of my life and think, "Oh my God, it's true. I'm busy all the time, and when do I feel like I have enough time or space to do something nice for myself or something that I think I want to do?

I really want to talk about this because I found it to be a really interesting personal experience that I have wanted to bring back daily tai chi and qigong into my life for years and I found it extremely difficult to do it, even though I've been taught from the beginning, two minutes is enough.

If you can just do two minutes, like you're doing the practice and you can gradually like make it bigger in 10 minutes or bring it into 20 minutes or whatever you want to do, but just start with two. And that seems like...

How can you possibly not have two minutes in your life? And yet, I will avoid the heck out of doing this thing that I say that I want to do because I feel like if I take that time for myself

It's like it's selfish or something or that I could be doing something more productive with my time or something that's contributing to other people more profoundly or deeply or should be spending that time planning something epic for my family or I don't even know...

But I have these insane expectations and most of them have been unconscious because if when you're conscious about it, like me just speaking it aloud right now, I'm like, "Blaze, that's freaking ridiculous. What are you doing? Go take two minutes to like do some breathing exercises and move your hands. It's fine." And yet.

We have so many excuses for why we avoid having spaciousness or allowing enough time that that feels like something that you want to do.

I know that I tackled this topic a little bit back in the spring when I was talking about creativity and scheduling time for fun stuff. I forgot even what I was going to say. This is how full our schedules get in our minds is that you can't even connect a thought from the past.

The idea of it though is that we have all of these things that we want to do. We have a concept of ourselves about what has purpose and meaning in our life and how it's contributing and where it fits in.

And sometimes, this is the one that blows me away. It is easier for me to be distracted just playing a video game or scrolling on my phone than it is to take that same exact amount of time and do something more nourishing, like read a book, do some Tai Chi, call a friend.

(To) like actually have these moments that used to be more interactive. Ah, okay.

It's about creativity. It's about having boredom. That's what I was trying to connect it to. See how much I avoid boredom as I can't even think of it! It's blocked out of my mind. Uh, it's so true though.

I think that as a society we have really lost our relationship with boredom.

And I actually think the summer is a great time to talk about boredom because I think

If you're of my age or older, you spent a lot of time in your summers as a kid being bored out of your freaking mind.

You were bored, senseless. You had nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to play with.

There was nothing on TV. You couldn't instantly download anything. There weren't computer games. Like your best bet was to just try to wander through the neighborhood and find another child that might want to play with you. But maybe they were on vacation and they weren't even home. So you walked three miles and you were thirsty and tired and dirty and nobody cared and you had to come home.

But these are the things that, I don't know, like those are memories, the core memories of mine, where I do remember these moments of like walking up and down hills trying to find a companion or someone who wanted to play with me.

And then having to just come up with a game on my own or just come up with something with these kids because there was nothing to do.

And I find that that is so lacking in modern society right now. There is so many scheduled, planned, curated activities to capture the imagination and build the mind and cultivate whatever it is that we think we're cultivating,

But we've neglected to cultivate an ability to be with nothing, or to be bored or disinterested or have to come up with something creative to do.

Even our creative outlets kind of have structure in them now, so I feel like there's so many programs to help you create art or do something or take a class, and we're not even trying to teach ourselves anything on our own anymore. There's so many ways to interact.

I think that that's really, really great, but I also think we're missing an essential ingredient of what it is to be human there, and I want to give all of us listening permission to not do stuff sometimes.

To actually have a day where you legitimately get asked what did you do and you're like I sat on my butt outside and stared at a beetle that happened to be crawling on this flower and I thought it was really cool.

And then it made me think I wanted to draw a picture, so I tried to draw a picture and it sucked, so I threw it out. And that's all I did. I did nothing else.

I had a soda with some ice cubes and just very simple things and have that be enough.

I just got delighted thinking about a day like that because even knowing that it's possible, I still structure my days and have all these expectations that I have for myself. I know the average person today is really struggling with that.

So I want to talk about how joy is essential and joy often does bubble up out of boredom and all these emotions that we spend a lot of time avoiding.

When you're able to be with discomfort, with just mind-numbing nothingness.

Out of that can often come these moments of awe and fascination and inspiration.

But they do take time to kind of seed in our mind or become something. And time is that essential ingredient. And if you rush past it and fill every moment of your time,

You'd never have enough to build something like that. So I'm going to bring it back to the qigong practice and how I've been wanting to layer that into my days and what's helping me get past the bump on that so that I'm doing the thing that I wanted to do.

So you and I all know, we can talk about it as much as we want. There's things that we want to do and there's stuff that we know what we should be doing. We know when we could be filling it in.

And yet for some reason we just don't take action on it and we do the same thing that we're always doing despite that.

So here's one of the ways that I tackled it is

First, I said, "Okay, I'm going to get really clear with myself exactly how much time I have and what's going on and what my obligations are so that I'm not lying to myself anymore about not having the time."

So I want to be clear to myself about how often I get up and just immediately end up like logged into Steam and playing a game, or I end up immediately going in and...

diving into work without taking time to do anything else, like how much am I actually spending on meal prep and driving people?

So I looked at my schedule and I said, "Okay, you actually have consistent, fairly consistent chunks of time in the morning that could be used to do these things that you say you want to do, like going for a walk, practicing qigong, and playing the viola. How much time do you actually want to put into that?"

And what I realized is that I had such lies in my head about how much time I thought I was going to need to take in order to have checked the box and say that I had done it.

And I think this is something that we all do too, is that we schedule our lives because we don't trust ourselves to be able to do something if it's not like...

the best possible version or the longest amount of time. Like we just discredit like a 10 minute walk as not being enough. It needs to be an hour and qigong needs to be 20 minutes instead of two minutes.

Practicing the viola needs to be 30 minutes and I'm like, well, physically, I know I can't even hold the viola up for that long. Yeah, I'm just, I'm not a concerto person. I've never done that. So that's probably not where I'm going to be. So then I got more realistic about that and said, okay, well, what if I just said,

Your flow is gonna be, you're gonna bring your kid where she's gotta go. You're gonna get up in the morning.

And when you get home, you're gonna go for your walk. When you get back from the walk, you're gonna just do some quick qigong in the yard.

And then when you get in before you log onto your computer, because you pass the viola on the way, even if it's just picking it up and plucking a few strings and just doing a quick scale.

You will have touched it today and that's going to count. And it relieved so much pressure from me. And I was like, OK, so that's where it started in the spring before the summer started.

Now that it's summer, one of the excuses that I used was like, "There's no way my kids gonna let me have enough time to go for a walk and do qigong and be able to play the viola," like she's going to want to be entertained all the time.

And I had to really stop myself and say, "Is that true or am I setting that up to be true?"

And could I trust that she's capable of having emotions about me taking some time that isn't about entertaining her, but she's going to respect me more if I take it and maybe she'll start doing stuff on her own as well.

So as school ended, and we're now in this time where we do have our shared days together because we're not dropping her off at camps all the time.

I could have said, "Well, nope, everything is different. We're not getting up and going anywhere anymore, so now the pattern's disrupted and I can't do it." I said, "Nope, you still can."

When you get up after you have breakfast, you can invite her to come with you or not, but you're going on a walk regardless. And then when you get back, you're doing your qigong. And what has happened is that sometimes she joins me, sometimes she doesn't.

And sometimes she'll take time while I'm doing qigong or walking to take care of her garden and sometimes she'll even help me take care of mine.

And then she doesn't like being around when I'm playing viola because I still suck at playing viola and that's fine.

But she can play her piano downstairs, or she can go work on her art project or whatever.

I started to realize how much of preventing myself from touching things that bring me joy or that I really wanted to have my hands in had a lot to do with negative stories I'm telling myself and also building in excuses and making it harder for myself to do it.

And I made it harder by saying that there wasn't enough time or there's no way I could dedicate this hour to just me doing fun things because good God, the world might fall apart if one hour of one day or every day if I didn't dedicate myself entirely to everyone around me. That's a big one.

So I know so many of you that listen to this podcast are here because you're recognizing yourself.

You're hardworking, you care about people, and you want to show up and we're caretakers and we love everyone and we're really empathetic.

But because of that, we pour so much of ourselves and our attention into being there for other people, we don't give ourselves that same space. I want to tell you, it's amazing if you make yourself as much of a priority as everyone else.

And that you're not less of a person or not showing up for people by taking an hour of your day to do things that nourish you or that make you feel like you're really present or allowed to be bored or have frustration.

That's beautiful. And weirdly, maybe we do have to start by scheduling it. I did. I had to say, like, the first hour to hour and a half of my day is mine.

And I could have filled it with just continuing to play video games and to be honest sometimes I still do.

But the majority of the time now, I at least go on like a half mile walk if not a full mile or two or three.

And then I do a little bit of qigong or some days I do a long time. And then I'm going to be honest, I'm not amazing at building in longer stretches of time for viola. I don't know when I'll get better at that one or if I ever will.

But two out of three ain't bad, right? And I also love that it's teaching my daughter that it's cool to do this.

And I want her to grow up feeling like it's important that you do take some time to schedule things that are important to you or make that space important in your day.

As important as getting your homework done or doing your chores or showing up for other people or going to parties or whatever it is that she has going on.

I think that's a really important skill to cultivate in ourselves and in our children and I want to see that happen because I think how cool will it be when she's an adult?

To have her living her life not feeling obligated to always be doing for other people or going out and doing things that maybe she doesn't have time for or doesn't want to do, but that she has made time for the things that she did find really precious.

So I want to get back on track about the scheduling aspect of all of this.

Because beyond us avoiding things that we might want to do or not want to do, I think the over scheduling has a lot to do with not wanting to miss out, and also feeling the truth that when we don't schedule or make time for something, other stuff always creeps in.

Somehow someone has filled up that time for you even if you haven't already done it. And it can be so frustrating. So sometimes we proactively fill our calendars just so that someone else doesn't fill it for us.

So there is a distinction between having the structure of a calendar, which is really supportive and gives shape to your days and creates stability and lets you predict what's going to happen.

But saturation is what happens when you've packed it relentlessly. And there's so many things going on that you feel like there's no recovery time.

It's not that the planning of everything was the problem. It's that if you plan so many things that there's no space for you as a living being to exist.

That's when it's a problem. So what does it look like to leave space?

It can look like saying one thing is enough. So instead of stacking multiple plans, so I'll be clear. Like when I stacked my morning and said, I have the hour and I can do these three things in it.

The important part of that was it's okay if I only do one of them, but the space exists for all of it if I want to or have the chance.

It means that you're not rushing from one thing to the next. So here's something I want to say about my morning plans is that initially when I started doing it,

I felt like I had to hurry through my walk and then hurry through qigong and then run upstairs and like hurry through like a five-minute blip of practicing scales so I could check the box and say, "Did it?"

That's not, I think, what I was actually after with that plan and as I realized it, I went okay you've created the space you have the time.

Look at what happened when you went really fast. You did get a mile walk in and it was done pretty quickly and then you got home and you did your qigong pretty quickly.

And you came in and you, yes, you touched your viola, good for you. And you still have an hour and now you can play video games.

I laughed at myself with that and went, "Oh, actually you're safe to slow down. You can take a longer walk. If a bird is doing something interesting, you want to listen to the beautiful songs and like smell some flowers because something bloomed that hasn't been in bloom lately."

It's okay to do that. If I run into someone and I want to walk an extra lap with them, I'm going to do that.

And then when I come home and I do the qigong in the yard, some days I'm saying, you know what, if I really am enjoying it, just enjoy it. And if I'm running a little late for whatever it is that I'm scheduled to do after that, which is.

Depending on the day, usually it's more chore related. I have a lot more household duties than work duties these days because I work for myself and I'm so grateful.

There's still always going to be more to do. But I'm giving myself the space to indulge in the thing that feels like I'm really connecting with it in the moment.

And what I've learned from it is my own natural feedback says, "Viola isn't it right now. I'm not gonna do it. I am enjoying and grateful that I can, but I don't feel compelled to rush home so that I can fit that practice in anymore and I'm not that worried about it because I know at some point it will take more of a center space in my energy and in my awareness and in my life.

And I think that'll happen for you as well when you start realizing, hey, if I carve out a chunk of time.

Something naturally that I want to do is going to fill up that space. So be easy with yourself when you realize that you're rushing through your fun things just like I was and then allow yourself the opportunity to relax into it and go, "Oh, well maybe I made an hour and that's enough for one of these things to be really fulfilling and great."

No matter what, giving yourself that space allows you to be able to be present in it and to enjoy it and it's worth it even if it's not all five things or things that you wanted to do.

It's the beginning and that's enough. It's so important.

So having a full calendar doesn't mean that you have a full life. It just means that you're busy.

I personally... I am busy, but I don't want the point of my life to be how many things I did, because here's the last thing that I was saying before I go.

One of the most delightful things that I talked about with my dad this week was about my daughter's little crochet creations and the discussion that we had when she made it.

And how silly it was and how I was trying to challenge her to do harder things than she wanted to do with it and how angry she got, but then she came back and she was proud of what she did. So yeah, there was like life lessons and stuff in there.

But what I gained from remembering that is that it's these little interactions that weren't scheduled that created the fullness of my life. I wasn't on the phone with my dad, rehashing the incredible five-hour walk I had. It wasn't about how many podcasts episodes I've recorded. You know, it wasn't anything about that.

The fullness in my life was in these interactions and being present enough to challenge each other and go back and forth and have that space. And I think that's what all of us innately recognize is that

The important pieces of our lives are moments of presence, moments of laughing with each other and challenging each other and challenging ourselves.

And that's what's building our life. It's not about how many things I had to do and how busy I was that I couldn't go out for lunch or whatever. That's not it. It's the things that I do, not the things that I'm prevented from doing.

Anyway, I think that I'm going to end here with saying that trying to fit more things into your life won't make you enjoy it more, but it is totally okay and doable to enjoy the things that you do have and that you are doing and to ease up around it. Give yourself permission to do it a little slower, not do it as well.

Do it in a longer space of time, a longer stretch of time or a shorter one.

And that not of it has to be perfect in order to be perfect for you. Yes.

Next week we're gonna talk about planning because I think sometimes we feel like our plans weren't working and maybe that's why we're not getting where we wanna go in life.

And I want to question that too and say, "All right, do we need to plan everything? Is it time for a new plan at this time of year?"

What is it time for? Because maybe we're all feeling a little bit antsy and I know the middle of the summer can feel like...

We're just looking for relief valve somewhere and sometimes we think that replanning everything or...

Redoing our concept of what we want is appropriate and that it'll fix it. I don't know if that's true.

It'll be an interesting talk. I'm looking forward to seeing you there. Have an awesome week, and I'll see you next time.

Related Episodes

Series: Creativity, Boredom, and the Art of Slowing Down Sometimes the most productive thing we can do is nothing at all. These episodes explore how to reclaim your imagination, embrace the fertile ground of boredom, and find joy in the unscripted moments of life without the pressure of performance or planning.

• Bonus: How to Use Your Imagination Without Overwhelm – A conversation with artist Sarah Bush on navigating the messy middle of creativity and why you don't have to rush your ideas into completion.
• Ep 38: Refinement Over Planning: How to Simplify Your Summer Without Adding More (coming soon) – Why small adjustments beat overhauling your life when you're already tired.
• Ep 36: Stop Performing Your Life: How to Show Up Authentically During Summer – Why you don't need to be "on" all the time to belong.
• Ep 09: Reflecting Without Shame — A Year-End Ritual – A shame-free way to look back on your year that moves away from productivity and comparison, honoring nourishment and resilience instead of just outcomes,
  

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