What's fun?

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Welcome to The Haven…

…a place where you can take a breath, find comfort and understanding, inspiration and ideas to overcome your overwhelm and move forward with more calm and joy.

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I’ve been thinking about the role fun plays in our lives. How we make (or don’t make) space for it. Its importance, its value, the difference it makes to how we feel on a daily basis.

Fun is something that easily gets squeezed out. It falls to the bottom of our priority list because… well, it’s frivolous, right? Fun, playing, messing about – it’s not as important as work or taking care of loved ones or getting dinner on the table or any other responsibility you have.

We see fun as a bonus. Fun is the mint you might get after you’ve eaten a three course meal and finished your drinks and paid the bill. Sometimes fun gets bumped up to dessert but it’s certainly not the main course or starter. 

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Here's how I think many of us divide up our time: Work takes priority because we have to earn to pay the bills and put food on the table. When we’re not working we’re taking care of our loved ones, cleaning the house, making dinner, putting on a laundry load, booking the car’s service… And when we’re not working or meeting our responsibilities we might be exercising, shopping, going out for dinner or vegging in front of Netflix.

Some of these things can be incredibly fulfilling, satisfying, rewarding, even fun. But not necessarily so. A lot of the time these things are what we need to do, what’s required, what’s expected.

Depending on your motivation a task like gardening can be a chore or a joy. If you’re excited to bring colour into your windowbox, you love playing around with where you position plants and your hands in soil makes you feel like a kid again then gardening is fun for sure.

But if you’re thinking you’ve got to weed the flowerbed before the ground elder chokes the plants, your neighbours must be appalled at your garden’s scruffiness and watering is a bore then, on this occasion at least, gardening will feel like a tedious bind.

Of course our duties and responsibilities like work and care-giving are important and priorities in our lives. And the weight of those responsibilities can sit heavy on our shoulders. The constant doing, the ticking off the to do list, the meeting expectations, fulfilling our roles can make it feel like we’re on a treadmill. It’s the feeling that we’re always doing what needs to be done, what should be done, what has to be done that is wearing.

Fun that doesn’t feel so fun

Even if we’re doing supposedly ‘fun’ stuff like dinner out with friends or watching a movie or reading, our enjoyment of these connections and activities can be dulled by a sense of heaviness. A feeling of not being fully present because not only are you thinking of what’s to come, what needs to be done next or tomorrow, but also because you’re tired – mentally and emotionally as well as perhaps physically – from the constant motion of all you have to do.

This slow and sure grinding down not only makes the challenging stuff feel more challenging it also takes the shine off what’s supposed to be the lighter side of life, the stuff that you expect or ought to enjoy. But because these moments are squeezed in around the edges, or happen after everything else, or perhaps aren’t truly what you’d choose to do but you dare not say it out loud (or perhaps even to yourself) they don’t refill your tank in the way you want, hope or need.  

And so on the cycle goes, slowly and surely life feels just that bit more difficult, more tiring, more weighty. The idea of having fun feels more and more unlikely, there’s no time for it after all and what would even feel like fun now?

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Instead of making fun the mint you might get as a bonus long after your meal has finished, bring it into the main event. Make it an amuse-bouche before you even start on your starter. Add in fun as a sorbet between courses to refresh and energise.

Allow yourself to have fun, to play, to mess about, to do what makes you giggle and grin from ear to ear before and in amongst your work and your responsibilities and your to do list. Because that is what will lighten the load of your work and your responsibilities and your to do list.

Not because any of it will disappear or change or lessen in importance but because how you feel about it will change. Because of how you think about and the energy you bring to those tasks and activities. What is required or needed may not change (although it could because you may bring a different perspective to it) but having experienced moments of fun, play and joy you will be changed, for the better.

We can put off the fun stuff until later (which often never comes) because we think it needs a significant chunk of time. Or that we need to do something FUN that is worthy of the name or, more accurately, what we think other people would think qualifies as fun. Or that the fun is conditional – it needs to be productive somehow, something needs to come out of spending our time in this way (thanks, capitalism!).

What’s fun for you?

It doesn’t have to be any of those things. The only criteria fun needs to meet is that it feels like fun for you. And if you don’t know what could feel like fun for you think back to what you loved to do as a kid. Fun doesn’t have a minimum time requirement – you can get a burst of joy from a playful couple of minutes.

Let me give you an example. I could feel the pressure rising from everything I needed to do before this weekend. My first thought was that I needed to crack on, there was no time to waste… but what to do first, there’s a lot that felt urgent. And then I paused, looked at the sunshine outside and decided I needed to inject some fun into this moment to lighten what was beginning to feel like a heavy load and to shift my perspective, literally and figuratively.

So I dug out a little tub of bubble solution (water mixed with detergent with a little wand), went outside and blew bubbles. I watched the bubbles float across the lawn, a few burst on my face, others landed and suspended on a blade of grass and some were quickly whisked away by the wind. And I giggled and giggled to myself.

I remembered how much I loved to do this as a child. I thought about how the bubbles might float as far as the street and surprise a passer-by or how a neighbour glancing out of their window might smile to see bubbles drift past their view.

And then I went back indoors, put the bubbles back in the cupboard (at the front this time) collected my laptop and a deckchair and went back outside to work. I cracked on with my to do list, but this time with a different perspective (which also pointed out to me I could work just as well in the garden as I could at my desk) and a different, lighter energy.

A couple of minutes of playful fun and it shifted the tone and the trajectory, of my day.

This isn’t about blowing bubbles or being outside or working in a garden. It’s about allowing yourself to inject moments of fun and playfulness into your day. At the start of your day, throughout your day, not just when you’ve done everything else, taken care of everyone else, and think you may have earned it.

What does fun look like for you? I’ll add in the comments what else feels like fun for me so we can share ideas and widen our pool of playful inspiration.

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More for you:

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“Before coaching I felt flat, disconnected and overwhelmed, I couldn't find joy and I realised I couldn't struggle on alone any more. Now I'm finding it easier to say no, to delegate, I realise I matter too, I take much better care of myself, and I do something I relish every day. I'm less resentful, burnt out and I'm much more open to life. Coaching with Gabrielle has been illuminating, safe, and such a positive experience.” - D.S.