It is a truism of parenting that it goes so fast, but as anyone who has been forced to sit on a bench and watch their children run tireless circuits of the playground knows, sometimes it goes so slowly you feel as if you’re losing your mind. I know people who will do anything to avoid playground duty, will beg their friends to coordinate so they don’t have to do it alone, or will discreetly wear headphones throughout so that, while maintaining eyes on their children, they can listen to a podcast and be entirely mentally absent. As the weather heats up and we crawl out of our screen-dependent winters, New York playgrounds are alive with the shriek of, “Joshua, 10 minutes!” I have fought with the Joshua-10-minutes tendency for years. The urge to cut short the visit – to the playground, the park, the toy aisle at Target – came on strongest when my children were smaller and could still be a danger to themselves. Somehow the combination of mindless repetition (on the slide, on the swings) and the need for hypervigilance in case someone fell off something induced a state of almost exquisite boredom that I occasionally think has an equivalence in, for example, bag checkers at the airport: the job is monotonous in the extreme but the consequences of not doing it properly can be dire. That particular dynamic has changed over the years as the requirements for my involvement have evolved. These days, long periods will pass in which nothing is required of me at all, punctuated by the occasional request – “watch this! That wasn’t it; that wasn’t it either” – that I check in to witness someone doing a cartwheel. If I wanted to, I could disappear into back-to-back episodes of my current podcast obsessions, You’re Wrong About and This Is Actually Happening, and at the beginning of this spring, I did. The experience felt simultaneously like an amazing win and vaguely like cheating. To be present/not present when you’re cleaning the house is one thing; yet to mentally absent oneself from one’s kids – to be always projecting forwards in anticipation of this particular moment being over – has started to feel like missing the point. I should add that, in general, and when it doesn’t involve swings, I am very good at doing nothing. I could sit looking at the wood grain on a table for a long time and be more or less content. There is copious literature on the necessity of boredom for children, mostly mentioned these days in the context of warnings about overscheduling and screens. There is less about the usefulness of “boredom” for adults, and what there is tends to be found in the literature of time-maximisation, where boredom is often framed as an aid to creativity or achievement. In and of themselves, these idle periods have no apparent value. But increasingly they strike me as the solid matter of life and the moments I’ll look back on with the deepest nostalgia. I’ve been having this sense for a few years now, but it’s pathetic that what has sharpened revelation is the experience, twice in a row, of accidentally going out without my phone. After the panic subsided, I sat in the sunshine while my children rode their bikes up and down and then ditched them to play in the sand. I watched a barge make its way up the Hudson. I pointed out two sparrows enjoying a sand bath. (What even is that?) I could have been listening to the real-life story of a woman who survived a home invasion, but instead I eavesdropped on some young people playing volleyball farther up the sand. I felt very happy that I was neither young nor under any obligation to play volleyball. When the reflex urge to shout “Guys, 10 minutes!” surfaced – because, realistically, how long can I be expected to just sit here? – I did the wildest thing and resisted it. “Don’t bring your phone,” they both say now when we go out. There are limits to this lassitude, which the other day nearly caused us to miss the last ferry off Governor’s Island. And I do occasionally worry that, taken to an extreme, I will one day relax into a formless blob of inactivity that I will never fully be able to pull out of. The funny thing is that of the two experiences of boredom, fighting it was the one that delivered the greatest sense of dead time, of passively waiting for something to end. The other – phoneless, rooted in minor-league bird watching – felt as active and urgent as only the best use of one’s time can. Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist