Having Fun Joanna Young asks: If fun changes the way that we do things… how can we add more fun to what we do? • What more could I do if I looked for ways to add more fun to the everyday? • How can I learn to have fun? • How can having fun help me to learn? There were many valuable responses to her query. I added mine. But it became obvious to me that her questions were deeply felt, and deserved a much more considered response. Or maybe several. My first suggestion: start with the fun that is already there. Before trying to add more fun, slow down enough to see the fun you are actually already having. When you were a kid, you didn't need to have anyone make a set of steps into a piano. Stairs were just as much an invitation to fun as escalators and elevators and sidewalks and subways. You could have fun going down stairs on your bottom or rolling a ball down the stairs or trying to bounce a ball up the stairs or trying to go up the stairs backwards or walk down the stairs two-at-a-time. Same with reading and running and counting and painting and dancing and hugging. That fun never goes away. What goes away is our willingness to choose to have the fun that is offered us. We have too many other things to do. We're not in the subway because we want to play. We don't take the escalator because it's more fun. We are there because we want to get somewhere else. So we aren't, in fact, totally there. And because we aren't, we don't see the fun. Making the steps into a piano keyboard made us pay attention to where we were. It was an invitation to fun, and it worked. And it will continue to work, but only for a while. And only for those who are not in too big of a hurry, or too tired, or oppressed by the noise and the crowds and the smells. After a while, even the piano stairs won't be able to compete for our attention. Or jar us from our inattention. After a while, the fun will fade into the background, and get lost. And no one will notice that the stairs look like a piano or sound like a piano. And we'll need to make the steps into something else. Or, you could find other ways to remind yourself. Keep a ball in your purse. A super ball, just in case. Or a yo-yo. Or better yet, a paddle ball - you don't even need the paddle, just the ball and elastic. Or make yourself a list of games you could play on the way - on the stairs, in the subway, on the sidewalk. Like The Walking Game. People talk about "humor" as if it were a "sense" - like the sense of taste and touch and such. They also sometimes talk about the "sense of play" and "sense of fun" - and though it has nothing immediately to do with what we're about to play with, there's also the "sense of self" and "sense of community." And then of course there's nonsense, which I guess is also a sense. These senses - the senses of humor and play and fun - are, as far as I can understand, genuine sensitivities. A person with a "good" sense of humor or play or fun can somehow sense just the right thing to do or say to make things fun or funny. When their sense of humor or play or fun is off, when they are "over the top" or seem too serious, they stop being fun, they just aren't that funny. Then there's the senses of self and community. These play an important role in our senses of fun and play and humor. The better our sense of fun, play, humor, the better our sense of self, and our sense of community. One of the easiest ways to sharpen your own sense of fun is to have it with others when you and your friends, or your family, or your colleagues, are all being funny together. And, of course one of the easiest ways for you to be funny together is to play games, especially funny games. I happen to have compiled a collection of these very same games. I call this collected compilation the OtherGames. Can you guess why? After you've explored your own "sense of play" and playfulness, it might be time for you to contemplate what exactly fun means to you, and you mean by it. A good way to start is by reading what other people say about it. And a good place to start that is this article: Of Fun and Flow. Flow talks about really big fun - the kind of fun that transforms you, that you risk your very life and limb, or vice-versa, to experience. After you've read that, it will be helpful to balance your perception of all things fun by reading about the gentler, more subtle sorts of fun: what I call Minor Fun. All of which is simply to help you start thinking about fun, because it has been my experience that the more often I think about it, the more often I notice myself having it. With the apparently unlimited opportunities for fun offered to us every moment, it is often puzzling that there are times when we actually choose not to have it. Fun is so, well, fun. Why, when we could so easily be having fun this very minute, would we choose to have anything else? Sure, there are many, many things to be worried about, to be angry about, even poverty, injustice, callousness, selfishness, greed, disease, the myriad of miseries. But none of those preclude fun. As so many people who have devoted so much of their lives and times to helping people attest to - the work, as hard and sobering as it can be, is most often fun of the greatest, deepest, and most profound ilk. And yet, from time to time, we get grumpy. We get so grumpy that we reject rejoicing, deny delighting, and all but celebrate suffering. The Oaqui attribute this to the need to acknowledge The Not-Yet Fun. "...our world," explain/s the Oaqui, "apparently came into being during The Billion Years of not-yet-fun, which was billions of years after the whole idea of not-yet-fun was considered at all funny. Fun...is the exception. Not-yet-fun the rule. This is why making anything lastingly fun frequently requires a combination of lifelong commitment, spiritual heroism and a multi-million dollar marketing campaign." The worse thing one can do when one feels the need to be grumpy is to deny the grump - privately or publicly. The best, not only to acknowledge it (again both privately and publicly), but to embrace it. Letting people know that you are feeling grumpy helps them give you the space you need to wallow, and gives them the permission to acknowledge the existence of the not-yet-fun in their own lives and loves. Letting yourself and the world-at-hand know that you are feeling grumpy helps acknowledge and identify the notyet-fun, and to reclaim your purpose as someone whose sole goal in life is to make it more fun. And, for the more sobering purposes in our lives, this BBC article cites Prof. Joe Forgas' recent findings that one's "mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style." Which one can use most constructively, especially when helping people understand that grumpy is what you are currently feeling. Just as the easiest way to have fun is to start with the things that are already fun, the easiest way to develop the art of making things fun is to start with things that are meant to be fun in the first place. Since games and toys are purportedly for that very purpose, they are the best tools to use in your exploration of fun-making. I concluded The WellPlayed Game with a semi-poetic, long-winded, in-depth exploration of that very process, and called it: "A Million Ways to Play Marbles, At Least." A next step would be to make games from things that aren't meant to be either games or toys. For example, you can make a game you know out of things that really have nothing to do with that game, as in Found Object Scrabble. For yet another example, see what I consider to be one of my conceptual masterworks in that very area: Found Object Olympics. Then there's making games out of things that aren't games at all. This is close to the ultimate way to create fun, generally engaged in by those who find themselves on what I seem to be calling the Playful Path. For an especially tasty example, there's dessertsharing, which is actually a game-like, playful thing friends and families might do together at a restaurant, ordering a bunch of different desserts, and then giving each other tastes, as requested. Which could lead one almost inexorably to a game of Dessert Roulette. Then there's making something fun out of something that isn't necessarily fun at all, as in the Piano Stairs experiment which launched this whole series of posts. Bernard Louis De Koven, Deep Fun