Fun

In the past couple of months, we have digested some deep and sometimes dark topics here. So I felt like it was time for a very different story. And since the majority voted for it in the last newsletter, let’s talk about FUN 🙂

13 years ago I broke up with my high-school boyfriend whom I had been living with for a couple of years. «When we’ll have kids, I am going to be the fun dad and you are going to be the serious mom.», he said one day. It was meant as a joke, but at the same time it wasn’t. It was the most condensed mental model of how he perceived our roles, even without being parents back then. Me doing the dishes, him playing video games until dawn. And it was the first time I thought about breaking up with him. It took me another year to finally go through with it, but this sentence has been stuck in my head ever since as a warning to myself.

I think it also resonated so much with me because I sometimes truly do have trouble perceiving the concept of fun. I have just recently started to grasp the importance of rest. But fun as in doing something just for pleasure, without a clear outcome in mind, that is something I seem to have a hard time with. In fact, I am often even puzzled by the kind of things others do for fun. Like my husband who enjoys watching FailArmy videos and insists on showing them to me from time to time. I really don’t get those. Neither do I get why driving really fast is fun. Or clubbing till 5 am. Or board games. I truly hate board games, in fact I would do almost anything to get out of a board game night…

Lately, I started paying attention to others having fun and whether or not I am able to buy into that. With the kids it’s quite easy. I made it a habit to not intervene with any of their ideas unless I have a really good reason to (i.e. it’s dangerous or will hurt someone else). So they get to jump around naked on the sofa dancing hard to really bad techno music, for instance. In fact, this has become some kind of evening ritual for them…

But when it comes to adults having fun… The other day, I was listening to Glennon Doyle’s podcast «We can do hard things» and my husband walked by. He just saw the cover on my smartphone and immediately made some sort of inappropriate joke about the title that I refuse to repeat here… 😉 I didn’t laugh, in fact, it made me really angry as the content I was listening too deeply touched me and I was in no mood to let him joke around about it. And this happens quite a lot: I am often too busy, too involved with myself or too uptight to let others interrupt me with fun activities or silly jokes. So this makes me wonder: Am I a non-fun person?

Let’s look at the definition of fun: «what provides amusement or enjoyment».

Great, I can work with that. Having a really tidy house is something that I enjoy a lot (although it never stays that way for more than a split-second thanks to my beloved roommates 😇). Working out cheers me up – but how much of it am I doing just to feel better about my body? I love fixing something broken or putting together furniture, but does that count as fun?

I guess we can experience joy without having fun (p.ex. me cleaning out the wardrobe). At the same time, not everything that brings us fun will contribute to a feeling of joy. Fun seems to be quite circumstancial and rather short-lived. Happiness tends to be linked to external factors, while joy is often referred to as a feeling that comes from within. It has to do with experiencing a moment of internal peace, like an inner smile. For me personally, joy is often the result of working through anger and restlessness, doing the inner work and coming out on the other side somewhat closer to the life that I truly want and to the person I truly am. All the fun in the world won’t make up for this process, for the gratitude we might experience when we find a moment of stillness and inner peace. However, on this eternal quest for joy fun is a great rejuvenating supplement to release the tension and restore some energy that comes in handy on our life-long journey. 

What fun, joy and happiness have in common IMHO is some sort of uplifting force, the ability to make us feel light, to take a weight off our shoulders and make life seem less serious – if only for a little while. This is the essence of what I call «butterfly moments» and why this newsletter was created in the first place: to start looking for them and to spot and discuss obstacles on the journey to more serenity.

So here are some of my favorite recent and not so recent butterfly moments:

• My little sister dancing to 90ies music like nobody is watching. This is the most beautiful and joyful version I know of her and it makes me smile just thinking of her that way.
• My kids cracking up when I tried to catch peanut flips with my mouth the other day.
• My husband trailrunning, jumping down the slippery path like a happy kid at ridiculous speed.
• Me turning up the volume and singing Madonna songs in the car (I guess that is the reason why for the past three months the kids have forced me to listen to «Like a prayer» in an endless loop: they have witness me sing it in a spontaneous act of joy and really seem to love this worry-free version of me).
• Rollercoaster rides with my family in an amusement park (although I haven’t been there in ages and poor dad used to get really sick…).
• And I also love traveling back in time to a special moment at the last family vacation in Florida when I was a teenager. My sister and me started laughing so hard, we couldn’t stop for at least five minutes (and I don’t even remember what it was all about, I just remember this feeling of laughing our asses off and it is forever preserved in the picture below. So I hope it puts a smile on your face, too.)

When was the last time you experienced a moment of joy? I hope you do today.

This text appeared in my thought-letter Tanja’s Butterflies (July Edition – Part 2). In case you are interested in future editions, feel free to sign up here.