If you can’t spend 10 minutes reading today’s essay but still want to sign up on the waitlist for my next movement/meditation/journaling series, Practice Not Perfect starting in September, please do!
Whenever I think for more than a moment about the word fun, I can’t help but be reminded of the iconic scene in the movie, National Lampoon’s Vacation. It’s when the family is headed west from Chicago to Wally World for a vacation and tensions are already high given multiple human and non-human members of the group have perished along the way, and they’re driving through a monsoon in Arizona when the father, Clark Griswold, played by Chevy Chase, screeches their 1980s woodchuck wagon to a halt to announce that they are no longer just going on a vacation — they are going on a “Fun Quest.”
I love the absurdity of this line and how it pokes fun at how un-fun the pursuit and manufacturing of forced fun is, plus the truth it points out that many of the things in life that are supposed to be fun (e.g., family time, traveling, going to a theme park) are not really all that much fun for a lot of us. So when a book called, The Power of Fun by Catherine Price crossed my radar last week, begging me to ask myself, “Do I know how to have fun?” — I remembered that scene and was cautiously intrigued. I knew there were at least two possibilities if I read it: either I would end up like Clark Griswold tearing my hair out in pursuit of that which cannot be pursued, or I would have some kind of epiphany about how to have fun again in honor of my self-proclaimed life season of summer colliding with my “Year of Play.” Figuring it was worth a shot, I dove in and read the book in three days.
To be clear, I am not a fun-loving person. I am desperately intense by nature and nearly all of my closest long-term or childhood friends later told me that when we first met they had to go out of their way to get me to crack a smile. One eventual third grade bestie told me I first shushed her during class as she was making a joke (aka distracting me from work) before she finally weaseled her way into my orbit. Another set of long-time friends like to remind me of when I declined their lunch invite at our first adult job in D.C., giving them the cold shoulder as I hunched over my computer screen because I brought my lunch and was “too busy.”
So yeah, sometimes I have a hard time having fun. There’s a good chance I tend to take life a little too seriously, which is why I’m now writing an essay to you about reading a book about having fun. That said, that little judging voice that I’m teasing out here is exactly what reading this book allowed me to explore. Because as Price explains, we all find our fun differently.
Price argues that true fun (not ‘junk’ fun like doom-scrolling or numbing out to a Netflix marathon) is when three of the following qualities of an experience come together: connection, playfulness and flow. She encourages a few exercises, and one of them involves writing down fun memories, as well as keeping an active fun journal, and ticking off which of them fits each of the qualities. I spent some time brainstorming the fun moments of my life that came to mind here on this Notion page. If you want some real TMI you can read through, or just save the template to reflect on your own.
Genuine connection is a core value for me. So it turned out that for all the memories I wrote down that felt playful and therefore sparked a sense of being fun, connection was already checked off. For me, connection is the prerequisite for playfulness. I have a hard time feeling playful with other people without some foundation of connection, so playfulness and connection are two peas in a pod. But the tricky part was throwing in flow. Because my flow activities are typically when I’m alone: writing, walking, hiking, reading, painting, gardening. There are a ton of memories and fun things I do all the time with my friends and loved ones where there is playfulness and there’s connection, but there isn’t exactly a flow state.
But then I journaled further, and I started to remember Friday nights at the 14th street Yoga District for Dharma yoga classes with our teacher Aqeel. It was a level 4 class with mostly yoga teachers and we’d chant and then he’d play Krishna Das and crack jokes with his dry humor, tossing in a fart noise during wind-relieving posture for good measure and we’d laugh and sweat and some of us would do fancy postures and eventually we’d take a nice long savasana and float home like little weirdos after practicing for well over two hours. I also wrote down another collection of memories of Sunday mornings at Bloomingdale, my old neighborhood studio, where our teacher Ashley (whose laugh was impossible not to catch as you walked into the room), and before you knew it you were performing some kind of arm balance or tumbling over yourself and the music was always incredible and it was so fun you forgot how hard it was. I also remembered teaching at 6:30am on Tuesdays to my steady and reliable Type-A regular students who appreciated my bad jokes and how every morning was core day and that without fail every time I would tell everyone to get a prop which we would never actually use because I seldom knew exactly what I was going to teach.
These were some of the moments that brought me playfulness, connection AND flow. They are the most fun.
In a month I’m planning to kick off my next cohort of Practice Not Perfect, my virtual movement/meditation/journaling series. I have a certain amount of confidence at this point given past feedback and current sign-ups that there will be a great group, and that inevitably the moments that I prepare for and teach these classes will be the most fun of my day. I will love making the playlists and the sequences and writing the meditation scripts and getting to know people.
And invariably, every so often when my guard is down, there will be a part of me that rises up right after class when the meditation ends, when I’m basking in the afterglow of fun. That part will say something like this: “Who do you think you are? You are such a fraud.” It will be a part that I know is trying to protect me, a part I’m learning to manage. It’s a part that believes that to have fun while working invalidates the work and that real work shouldn’t be fun because if it’s fun you shouldn’t get paid for it because it’s not real work. It’s a part that believes that fun is not something of value and therefore to get paid to offer an experience of fun is somehow duping people. I’m still working with this part of me, so there may be more left to uncover about what it’s trying to do, but I know enough to know I don’t want this part running my life.
The real win of this book for me was the permission it gave me to embrace that the practices and the work I do that is fun actually has value and should be prioritized and nurtured above the work that is un-fun.
So I will also ask you this: when you reflect on your fun moments, are there any common themes? And if so are any of the common themes related to movement, music, dancing, singing, writing, day-dreaming, being challenged, experiencing something new or feeling connected to nature? If so, you might find this series to be fun.
My intention for this next series is to have fun, and to remind my students that they too are invited to revel, enjoy and bask in fun that is their own. You don’t have to wait until Saturday night or pretend that a loud, raucous, crowded or thrilling evening works for you…when in fact it doesn’t.
Because if fun can mean moving in a room in the comfort of your home with like-hearted people to gorgeous music while feeling connected to something bigger than yourself then relaxing to the sound of crystal bowls and drifting off into an imaginary place only to pour words on a page and unlock something perhaps new about yourself in the process … maybe we’re all fun-loving people after all?