If it's not fun...
I often wake up in a funk, so I like to listen to comedy podcasts on my straight-outta-bed morning walk with my dog, Mama Sita. Today’s Smartless episode (with actor/comedians Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes) featured guest, James Cameron. Yes, THE James Cameron. What a human being, he is, going strong at 69 years old. This quote from him inspired today’s post:If you’re having fun, you’re not wasting your time.— James CameronIn case you’re not familiar, he created the original Terminator, the Avatar series, and has so many other accomplishments that it’s mind-blowing. (He’s discovered several undersea animal species, built a submarine and traveled in it SEVEN MILES deep), has five children, and so on. I say all this to point out that he’s incredibly disciplined and hard-working, and yet: he loves to have fun and it inspires him in so many ways. I encourage you to listen to it.
Having fun frees your mind, no matter how silly it seems.“Why bother?” is that toxic question that comes from the voice of depression. I know it intimately. But when we value F U N, it converts into, “Why not?” and speaks the voice of courage, fun, and curiosity.
Who Has More Fun: Kids or Adults?
The biggest confusion about adulting is that ‘kids have fun while adults are burdened with responsibility.’ But this is a very incomplete and more importantly, inaccurate picture.Youth times are also burdened: with insecurities due to minimal life experience, lack of resources (money and/or access to a network of supporters), and also creativity! The longer one lives, the more experiences one has, and therefore the bigger the basket of building blocks to tackle new adventures.As an adult, you come into your power. You need no one for your survival which is the opposite of when you were young. This dependency, coded so deeply into our corporeal selves, serves to keep us alive — yes — and also trains us to silence the wilder voices within. It trains us to “get by” rather than thrive. We haven’t yet proven ourselves in many ways so we are rightfully second-guessing many decisions to see if they turn out as we hope.Adults do have responsibilities, but as many have noted before me, the preferred spelling is response-ability. As we grow up, we can acquire a wild mashup of skills. Rarely do we stop and take stock of this personal expertise, though. It requires a continual assessment of one’s self and is best done with a huge dose of self-acceptance. The more the better, as in a giant mountain of self-acceptance surrounding a huge lake of self-acceptance.
Self-Acceptance is One Secret to Having More Fun
Self-acceptance is the opposite of second-guessing. Self-acceptance is the full-fledged commitment to one’s own definition of fun.Back in the late ‘80s, I was a mediocre runner. By luck of the lottery, I was accepted into the New York Marathon in 1988, along with over 22,000 other runners. Thrilled at my luck, I called my mom to tell her. Mind you, she was a suburban mom but one who was also quite athletic, from water skiing to tennis, to even getting a hole-in-one in her ‘80s. Nonetheless, this was her response:“Why in the hell would you want to do that? It doesn’t sound fun at all.”It turns out, having fun is a deliciously personal experience that no one can dictate to you — it’s yours to discover. Decades later in life, after acquiring Alzheimer’s disease and enjoying better living through chemistry (yay, Lexapro!) she re-committed to fun:If it’s not fun, we’re not doing it.— Blanche Benton
Having Fun Often Results from Very Hard Things
Running the NYC Marathon was as hard as it was fun and now I see them inextricably linked. As many adults come to learn, the hard stuff actually hides or brings a lot of fun! In fact, it is stuff that is so hard, kids couldn’t begin to do it. (See James Cameron, above.) So in this episode of mindset consciousness-raising, I want to celebrate the special ways that doing hard things can generate fun, so long as self-acceptance is in the mix.Here are my results, certainly “nothing to brag about” you might think, but considering that less than 1% have run a marathon, I’m taking this as a win. Still, you can see how far back I was in the pack. (Remember, I used to be Mary Anne Benton until I changed my name in December 1999.)
A marathon fun-vs-hard questionnaire:
Was it hard training for the marathon? Yes. (Running on the roads in the high desert with truckers harassing me…)Was it hard getting up at 2 am, prepping some carbs, and taking a bus to the race, in other words, hours of adrenaline-filled prep just to get to the starting line? Yes.Was it hard running for nearly 20 minutes *just to reach* the starting line? Yes. (LOL, that 20 minutes felt like such a waste of time!)Was it hard taking twice as long to finish as the winning female runner, Grete Waitz? Yes. (Easy to run 2.5 hours - how about running almost 5?!)Was it hard to keep going after hitting the wall and having everything in my body hurt and having my mind filled with defeatist thoughts? Yes. (“You. Must. Quit. Now. This hurts too much.”)On the other hand, was it cool to be one of the 17.78% of runners who were women who ran that year? Yes. (Less than 1 out of 5 were women.)Was it cool to meet others on the course who were older and less fit than I was? Yes. (Two Frenchmen in their 60’s who passed me by! A blind runner!)Was it amazing to be walking for a stretch in Harlem and have an older woman with a cane come out of church and lunge at me, exclaiming “Don’t you dare quit now, young lady! Get those legs moving and finish the race!” Hell, yes. (I owe my finish to her.)Am I still filled with awe 35 years later that I actually did this? Double hell yes.Is it essentially irrelevant that my performance was not record-setting? Absolutely yes. I did it for me, not anyone else.I am still having fun resting on my laurels from having run the NYC Marathon and it no doubt was an anchor in my psyche, encouraging me to go on and do a triathlon, then later, at age 51, paddle a 6-person outrigger canoe 43 miles across the open ocean from the island of Molokai to the beaches of Waikiki.It’s the counter-intuitive domino effect of fun that comes from hard work.If you live through it, it will make a great story!Thank you for reading Mindset with Roxanne Darling. Want to share it?