As many of you know, I used to be an import buyer, which means that I was flying from Seattle to Hong Kong quite often.

I used to love that flight. I hated the return flight, because I knew that when you fly east across the Pacific Ocean, you tend to have huge jet-lag problems that last for weeks. But flying west, there tend to be very few problems at all.

(By the way, something I learned a few years ago, and still find fascinating: The Pacific is so large that if you took all of the land on Earth, all of it, including Africa, all of Siberia, Antarctica, every single piece of land on planet Earth, and pushed it together, all of it would fit inside the Pacific. That’s how big the Pacific is. It’s an honor to have lived near it.)

One of the things that I loved about that flight, at least the westbound leg of it, was that there is a huge amount of time for your brain to decompress and then be bored and move on to other things.

Boredom tends to get a bum rap these days, as if it’s something negative that needs to be eliminated, but I think it’s a beautiful thing that needs to be sought out and embraced, because out of boredom come imagination, creativity, and deep thought.

Reminds me of a great scene from that TV show Seinfeld.

(By the way, most people over the age of 40 will recognize the Seinfeld reference, but there are many people on this earth now who will not recognize the reference, and I feel sorry for them.)

Anyway, in the scene, Elaine and Puddy are on an airplane and they are about to take off. Elaine whips out a book while Puddy just settles into his seat and stares at nothing. Elaine can’t deal with the fact that Puddy is apparently going to spend the entire flight just staring at nothing. It drives her crazy.

I am Puddy in that scene, celebrating the beauty of boredom.