what do you do for fun?
Several weeks ago, I asked a friend who is going through some serious crap if she was doing anything fun for the weekend ahead. She responded with a joke, asking “what even is fun anymore?” I laughed, uncomfortably, almost sadly, because I wanted to plan some fun for her.
A few weeks ago, I laughed - again uncomfortably - watching this video from Abby and Glennon (yes, we’re on a first-name basis, duh), where Abby is challenging her followers to help Glennon find something fun. The comments were full of A LOT of mostly women saying that they have the same problem as Glennon - that they don’t have much fun.
And then, this week, I read this Vox article, asking “what was fun?” The author seems to have the same problem as my friend and Glennon, at least during the pandemic:
It is fun to go for walks, to see friends on outdoor benches, to stream movies, to make doughnuts; what is not fun is me. What was once “novel” and “spontaneous” is now an exercise in planning — what is an equidistant park, is there a bathroom, will it rain? — and the effort of Zoom game night is more than I can give. Instead of a release, fun is yet another obligation: You are so lucky, I keep thinking. Why don’t you want to go apple picking?
The Vox article quotes organizational psychologist Michael Rucker who says, “What’s so awesome about fun is that it’s unique to the individual…Happiness has been boiled down to these survey instruments, where we can fill out bubbles on a Scantron, and then the positive psych gurus of the world can tell us whether or not we’re happy. But fun is meant to be owned by you.” [emphasis mine]
I wrote about pleasure for pleasure’s sake in this post, even repeatedly using the word “fun,” I’m noticing belatedly, to describe my 2020 obsession with Regency romance novels. Covid, as the Pantsuit Politics ladies have been saying, is an accelerant - a revealing of the cracks in our collective foundations that were already there but that many of us weren’t paying attention to. I think it’s telling us something about fun too:
1) many of us weren’t having enough fun in pre-pandemic times and
2) we let other people define fun for us instead of taking the time to figure out what is fun for us.
Obviously, the pandemic is taking away many of our choices of what we perhaps formerly considered fun, but I wonder too if it is an opportunity for us to define fun for ourselves - recalibrating to what actually brings us pleasure and that we look forward to - versus what we think we should be doing.
With the long Covid winter ahead, now might be the perfect time to figure out what you do for fun. Instead of looking at all of the things that we can’t do right now for fun, we could challenge ourselves to find (or rediscover) a few things that are Covid-safe fun. If you think about it, the ability to create fun for yourself at/around home is a super-power that will serve you long after Covid is gone. If you can find fun on your own or with the people you live with, you’ll probably end up being a more interesting person with a bigger savings account. You’ll also just be more content in general, more comfortable in your own skin, and have more self-awareness than you did before.
So start a list of things that you want to try in the season ahead, knowing that some will be boring, some will obviously not be your thing, but perhaps, at the end of this Covid winter, you’ll find a new thing or two that you do for fun.
If you need some ideas, email me because, as an #enneagram7, I always have a farrrr longer list of things that sound fun/interesting than I have the time to actually try or stick to! And remember that we’re all n-of-one projects so only you can define what’s fun for you.
Rants and raves
Covid ranting. I did plenty in last week’s newsletter. I also have been reading about the mental health crisis we’re facing (especially our kids) because of continued lock-downs. But like the false dichotomy between public health and the economy I wanted about in last week’s newsletter, I also think it is a false dichotomy between public health and mental health. As a society, we should be putting our kids first. They need to be in school - for the sake of their socialization, education, and mental health. So, as a society, we should prioritize keeping the kids in school at all costs. So then restaurants, bars, gyms, and all of the other adult places driving most of the spread of Covid need to be shutdown. I think we should pay these small business owners to close; that will be far cheaper in the long-run than the burden to our healthcare system and the long-term, generational trauma effects on our children, not to mention the trauma the rest of us are experiencing because of the complete failure of cohesive leadership. We should all want our kids in school. We will face societal ramifications of not prioritizing keeping our kids in school for decades to come. All because so many adults won’t act like adults.
Trauma education. Ever since listening to this mind-blowing podcast episode (do yourself a favor and skip to the 40ish minute mark) several years ago, I’ve been yelling to anyone who would listen that we should be paying for trauma awareness education in schools*. Trauma education would help us all build our empathy muscles and help us all have more compassion for ourselves and others. If 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we are suffering from a severe compassion drought.
*we desperately need it for adults too, but how do we do that societally? This is a question for another post because we also are in desperate need of some basic math, civics, and citizenry education for adults too.
Community. I’ve written some about our “deconstruction” of the faith we were brought up in. There have been many times since that unraveling started that we just wanted to give up on church altogether, but we’ve hung in there. There is nothing like your whole family testing positive for Covid to demonstrate to you how valuable and necessary community is. It doesn’t have to be a church community, of course, but I love how eclectic our church community is. I would likely never have met many of the people I now consider friends and family because our church tends to attract people who don’t fit in elsewhere in our very conservative county. Another lesson of 2020 has to be to find yourself a community if you don’t already have one.
The sense of smell. I still can’t smell anything, and I don’t think I’ll ever take it for granted again once (please, please, please) it comes back.
Worth sharing this week
My October what I’m learning and loving post in case you missed it (that massager would make an excellent Christmas gift for pretty much everyone on your list!).
“What does the saving reality of personal relationships require of us? We need to make sure we are not letting deferential fear do our thinking for us. This is the challenge even when we are not confronting an attempted coup involving elected officials and political appointees refusing to concede after a presidential election. It appears before us in myriad settings throughout our lives: the pressure to keep the peace that is no peace, the pressure to play along. The problem here is civil obedience. Our presumed consent functions as a free pass for abuse.” So much to chew on in this must-read piece from one of my favorite writers-who-makes-me-think, David Dark.
This Covid risk assessment tool based on the size of your gathering and your county. I used this as my data to backup the reason why we weren’t going to host/attend Thanksgiving this year.
We’ve been having family movie nights every night of this Covid quarantine we find ourselves in. We’ve loved all of our choices so far. Here’s our list of recs in case you need some ideas for staying in: Instant Family, Hoosiers (duh - this is the Grant equivalent of comfort food), Eurovision, Bend It Like Beckham, Jumanji: The Next Level, Enola Holmes. Disclaimer: depending on your unique kiddos, not all of those are suitable for your kids. Our kids are at stages where we prefer to let them watch a little more mature content, but watch it together and invite lots of conversation on anything problematic/not congruent with our family values that comes up.
You’re already signed up for AHP’s newsletter, right? If not, go read this whole thing and sign up. This especially hit me over the head and articulated what is at the root of so many of our problems 2020 has laid bare:
In the U.S., most of us aren’t taught to use our sociological imaginations. We’re not taught to think about social problems as structural problems. We’re not taught to see the forces that operate beyond our control – forces like capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. And we’re not taught to see how those forces create many of the challenges we face in our lives and constrain our ability to make choices that could help us overcome those challenges.
This was breathtakingly beautiful if you haven’t seen it making the rounds yet:
Seasonal pic of the week
How we’ve spent a ton of our Covid quarantine. Please do notice the outfit that Maeve has been wearing for most of the week:
Cheers to finding your fun in the season ahead!
Sara