The Fun Complex
Before moving from South Carolina to the Midwest a couple years ago, my husband and I wanted to take our two small boys to the beach for vacation one last time. South Carolina beaches are beautiful and we wanted to bolster ourselves with warm memories before moving to snowy Illinois.
As soon as our beach towels were laid out and our sunscreen slathered on I picked up our then 2-year-old son, Emory, and headed to the water. I charged into the waves, ready to enjoy the ocean. The first wave that crashed into us sent Emory spinning—his sunscreened skin slipped through my fingers and the wave jostled him about. I thrashed for a few seconds trying to grab his summersaulting body and finally plucked him out, holding him close to my chest and half laughing to down-play the situation while he was sputtering to catch his breath. “Get me out! No more water!” he screamed.
Needless to say, we couldn’t get him to dip a single toe in the water the rest of the day. He spent the rest of his time playing in the sand (far away from the water), half-heartedly building sand castles and digging roads. “He could’ve done that in our backyard sandbox,” my husband said. Sullivan, our other son, was apathetic and oblivious the entire day, as most fat, 6 month-old babies are.
This experience and other similar ones in my life have periodically caused me to contemplate the idea of fun. It seems that a lot of times when we have high expectations for a situation to be fun the pressure of those expectations can build and become suffocating, often leaving a vacuum of disappointment. We frequently rationalize before a vacation or special event, “This might be the last time we get to do this, or we paid a lot of money for this, we’re supposed to have fun as a family, or the kids deserve this, or we deserve this.” Kids especially, however, seem to have an uncanny awareness of when they are supposed to be having fun, and that subconscious burden hovers over the situation like a dark cloud. Even a magical place like Disney World, seems to be full of children having more meltdowns than fun, much to their parent’s dismay.
We plan each calendar year around our two weeks of vacation and slog through the responsibilities of every work week with lackluster attitudes. The pressure to enjoy our vacations becomes insurmountable—we work all year long for them. What if it rains the entire week, or we miss our flight, or one of the kids gets sick, as often happens on vacation?
Fun, whether at home or abroad is a difficult currency to count. There isn’t an objective way to tally up “fun points” or measure them on a scale. We usually decide if something is fun by how it appears to make the participants feel. The cropped and filtered pictures on social media that capture 2 minutes of enjoyment are easy to misinterpret. We are comparing our fun to someone else’s image of fun and feel gypped if ours doesn’t weigh as much as theirs did on the visual scale.
In general, there seem to be different levels of fun, which come with varying levels of reward. The most basic level of fun involves no risk and very little effort—eating an ice cream cone, watching a movie, feeding ducks. The next level of fun involves some amount of effort, work and investment. Camping in the mountains requires a lot of work and preparation and even some discomfort, but these are the moments of fun that we often remember more clearly. We recount with fondness the times that we were miserably hot or cold or had sand in our sleeping bags and couldn’t sleep because of howling coyotes. It is this miserable fun, or difficult fun that leaves the deeper imprint on our psyche.
Kate McKinnon, a comedian and SNL host, divulges in an interview that she often has the most fun in terrible situations. She gives an example of being at a jazz joint once where the jazz was truly awful but she had the best time making fun of it with her friends the entire night. She concludes, “If something is supposed to be fun I hate it.” Whether it’s laughing in church, or throwing rocks in grass your dad is about to mow, or whispering under blankets at a sleepover when you’re supposed to be asleep, the unplanned, mischievous fun almost always trumps the calculated, expected fun.
With much of the same sense of longing that we have when anticipating vacations or birthdays or holidays, we have when looking forward to new stages in our lives. On the other side of those exciting milestones we often feel flat and unfulfilled. We thought college would be more fun, or being 21, or being married or having babies, having adult children and grandchildren, or having the degree and career we always wanted….these should all be more enjoyable, right?! These are the events that we planned and prepared for. Then the guilt settles in. Maybe I’m the only mom who doesn’t like this stage of life. I’m a terrible human being for not enjoying the feeding, rocking and changing-babies-stage. Or, maybe I’m the only unfulfilled businessman with a dream-job. I have the career I always wanted, why does it feel so less-than-amazing?
When life feels subpar, whether we’re on vacation or celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary, and we find ourselves looking around saying, “I thought it was going to be better than this. I thought things were going to feel more right than they do,” we need to start looking elsewhere—outside of ourselves and situations. C.S Lewis summed it perfectly when he said, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” And James 4:14 in the New Testament beautifully says, “You do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”
These truths should liberate us; they are life-giving and freeing. We will surely stumble upon some really great moments here on this earth, but they can’t be the focus. When our hope is in God and the next life, the need to enjoy this one to the fullest and at all cost will crumble. So yes, let’s travel to Rome and Disney World and Yellowstone National Park. Let’s pursue a family and a job that fulfills us, but remembering along the way that fun is a byproduct of living with hope, and living for something more.
