Hello Lovelets!
When I think about the playgrounds of my childhood, I think about danger. I think about see-saws that somebody jumped off when I was at the apex, causing me to crash down to the ground and hurt myself. I think about swings with chains that crushed my fingers, and monkey bars that I never had the upper body strength to enjoy. I think about games of kickball that turned into LORD OF THE FLIES, and the rejection by pretty little girls with high ponytails who played jumping and skipping games I could never understand.
Recess, for me, was never the part of school that was fun.
Art class was fun. Music was fun. History was fun. Getting handed a fresh new blue essay book upon which to write the answers to an exam was fun. The really smart teachers who were passionate about education were fun. Starting a school newspaper and putting on a play were fun. All the stuff that happened INSIDE the school was fun.
All of which is to say, the things that other human beings consider to be fun have rarely felt like fun to me. And that is the subject of this week’s edition of Letters From Love: FUN.
Our special guest this week — my radiant and brilliant and loving friend Marie Forleo — introduced the word “fun” in her own letter from Love, and I honestly think it’s the first time a guest (or I!) have downloaded that word from the cosmos. This felt significant to me, and I wanted to go deeper into it!
What IS fun? Especially for those of us who never felt that the things our culture taught us are fun are actually fun?
Let’s find out.
Let’s ask Unconditional Love what it has to say about fun . . . and I can’t wait to hear your discoveries!
Love,
Your Lizzy
P.S. THIS is fun, by the way! To me, this deep inner mystical work is the most fun a person can have!
Dear Love, what would you have me know about having fun?
Dearest little frog on a lily pad — you are hilarious and adorable we love you. How very you, how very human, how very Calvinist, how very serious, to ask someone (even me, even Unconditional Love!) about fun, rather than asking yourself.
Can I turn the question back to you?
What do YOU think is fun, dear heart?
Because sometimes it looks to us like you have a kind of strange idea of fun. If aliens had been observing you your whole life, and they had to guess what activity was the most fun for you — meaning, what is the thing that this human chooses to do most often, signaling (the aliens would have to suppose) that you must SUPER enjoy it — they would probably guess that worrying is your favorite activity and the most fun a person can have, because you certainly return to it again and again.
Can I ask you another question, my little webbed foot? Can you tell me what is so everlastingly fun about worrying, that you constantly do it? There must be a payoff, we figure. What do you get out of worrying, or what do you think you get out of it? (And I know, I know, you asked me about fun, not about worry, but we’ll get there — and least I hope we’ll get there!)
I know the answers to these questions already because I know how to read your heart the way a sailor knows how to read the face of the sea. The payoff for you, my love, for constant worry, is that you get to feel like you’re in control of the world, and you get to make sure that people approve of you. And both of those things — control and approval — have become very important to you in your life. You have translated both of them into a sense of security — and I think you believe that someday if you feel completely secure you might start to have more fun.
I just heard you sigh.
Is this letter not fun yet, angel?
Sorry, babe, but you asked for the truth. Stay with me. I have treasures in here for you.
To really have fun, my love, you must let go of control and you must let go of the need for approval. This does not mean becoming reckless and wild and driving through the desert at night at 150 miles an hour, standing up in a convertible, drinking champagne out of a bottle, and screaming “I have never felt so freeeee!!!”
That is not you, nor has it ever been you, nor will it ever be you.
What registers in your body as fun has never been what other people call fun, and what other people call fun usually looks dangerous and chaotic to you.
What is fun for you, my love, is solitude. Quietness. The stillness of meditation. The search for God. The quest for wisdom. Writing poetry is fun for you. Silent creativity is fun for you. Hours at your desk, quietly writing. Doing deep, arcane, specific research is fun for you. Processing the patterns of the mind is fun for you. Epiphanies are fun. Breathwork is fun. Sitting quietly and saying nothing at all. Walking alone in the woods when nobody knows where you are is fun for you. Going to another country and sometimes not even telling anyone in your family that you went there, or when you will be back — this is fun for you.
You love your friends, and it is also true that you are your own favorite company. Talking and laughing to yourself while you clean and beautify your house, talking to your animals, talking to plants, talking to trees, this is fun for you. Listening to me, hearing me, feeling me, trusting me — this is fun for you.
Yet you give away the hours in which you can have these quiet, simple, yet for you deeply moving experiences of fun, because you are still trying to control the world and you are still trying to get the people in the world to see you as a good person — and what a “good person” means to you apparently, STILL, after all these years, is constantly making yourself available to the needs and moods and asks and demands of others. Which you can do to such an extent that it ends up not being very fun.
My love, you once heard a wise soul say that being a free spirit requires discipline.
It stuck with you, these words.
What kind of discipline do YOU specifically need, little wanderer, to be a free spirit? You need the discipline to stop yourself from trying to change the world, and the discipline to stop yourself from trying to constantly keep everyone in that world pleased and satisfied with you at all times. You need the discipline to accept that some people might not approve of your acts of sacred retreat. The discipline to endure it when someone does not think you are good, because you have not given them what they need, or because you have not done enough to satisfy them. You need the discipline to safeguard your solitude and your precious, quiet hours — the discipline in which living becomes, for you, so much delicious fun.
I know this letter is a bit more serious than what you’d expected, but my dear, I know you — and this is who you are, serious one. You are the girl who in ninth grade social studies class saw an image in a film strip about a monastery in Greece — a beautiful white stone building on an island, surrounded by walls, emanating stillness, and you thought, “I want to live there. That seems fun.”
Set aside some time for silence and solitude today, my love. For stillness. Today and every day. And in that silence, away from control and worry, come and meet me.
Oh, we will have fun. Yes we will. We always do.
Prompt
I know that on the surface it feels a bit contradictory to study the idea of fun, but if you’re like me, this is a good time! So if you’d like to join me this week in exploring what brings us joy and how we can come by more of it, you might pose this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about having fun? And let’s try to incorporate what we learn into the days ahead — because I have it on good authority that we are all deserving of delight and pleasure and fun.
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