Fun

Yesterday the weather was welcome, sunny and pleasant.  My family and I were like puppies yapping to get outside.  Sure, we had a lot to do to be ready for the upcoming week:  work and school projects, grocery shopping, laundry, a myriad of responsibilities could be listed.  But, we went outside and played.  Soccer balls tucked in elbow pits, sneakers laced tight we walked down the street to a school’s practice fields to kick and run and use our outside voices.  The afternoon got me thinking about fun.

Fun defines as follow from the Collins English Dictionary 10^th edition:

            1.  a source of enjoyment, amusement, diversion, etc.
            2.  pleasure, gaiety, or merriment
            3.  jest or sport (esp. in the phrases in fun or for fun)
            4.  facetious, ironic amusement, frivolous activity (fun and games)
            5.  to ridicule or deride (make fun of, poke fun at)

Planning the New Year and its goals I may have lost track of the need for fun.  Today I’m wondering about ways to have more enjoyment and amusement, pleasure, gaiety and merriment.  I’m not interested in poking fun; deriding others is decidedly NOT fun (particularly if you are the recipient).   I feel a longing for frivolous activity. 

I made a list of things I used to do for enjoyment:  spicy cooking, meandering mall shopping, late-night dancing, spontaneous road trips, canoeing, gorging myself at a pizza buffet.  These things are no longer right for me because the circumstances of my life have changed.  Most of the list requires me to have only my own agenda and time schedule to work with and a younger more tolerant body.

Fun may have changed over the years.  But, if I’ve tossed the old scenario of fun, have I replaced it with different amusement?  Even if fun now includes being in bed by 10:00pm, I still need to find it.  I may even need to plan it because I’m no longer a lone star but part of the constellation of a family with young kids.   I need a list of replacements I can do for enjoyment:  spicy carryout, card games, planned family trips, Saturday afternoon Dance Central, reading alone in my room, lunch with a friend. 

Sometimes my sense of responsibility overrides my feeling of wanting fun.  Do I need a clean toilet MORE than I need fun?  Sometimes.  But having paid no attention to fun I find myself feeling serious and in a slump, moody and down even when presented with the glory of a pristine potty.  I’m dismayed by how little time I invest in fun. 

Turns out that even though we spent the afternoon doodling around a soccer field, there was time for playful puppies to get school things in order, finish presentations, push laundry to the next day, skip the grocery store and eat whatever was around for dinner, fall into a heap and sleep soundly all night.  I want more fun in the future.