There is a German word for boredom — Langeweile, a long while — that carries what the English cannot: the implication that boredom is an experience of duration, of time stretching out unstructured, waiting to be inhabited by whatever the mind, left to its own devices, decides to do with it. Korczak observed boredom in his orphans with the same clinical attentiveness he brought to illness. He noted that children who were genuinely, uncomfortably bored did not remain bored. Boredom was a transitional state. The child passed through it on the way to something else — an invented game, a sustained fantasy, a conversation that explored new territory, or simply a period of quiet observation. The boredom was not wasted time. It was the soil in which self-directed attention grew. And self-directed attention — the capacity to decide without external prompting what to attend to and for how long — is one of the foundational capacities of the human