Hello. I trust everyone as well. Think to yourself, when was the last time you had fun?
Real fun. The kind of fun that made you laugh from your belly. The reason I bring this up is because we need to have fun.
Life can’t be all deadly serious. It’s got to be a bit of humor along the way, right? Got to be a bit.
So what do you do? If we’re going to have fun, then we realize that life is not that much fun, because I’m working like an absolute dog all the time. What do I do?
Well, I’ve read and I’ve tried it myself. It’s called situation comedy. You invent in your mind comedic situations, whatever they may be, and you just go along.
Perhaps you go to a park, you see some people playing, they’re trying to play a game of maybe tennis in the park or something, and someone is really bad, really bad. You’re not laughing at them particularly, you’re laughing at yourself.
The number of times that you tried something, and you were in absolute failure. But eventually, you just let it go, because it didn’t seem to matter, right? So how do we conceptualize fun?
Well, I think fun has got to be one of those things that is ultimately free.
It’s like trying surfing.
The government of Canada, 50 years ago, more even now, 60 years ago, one summer, they had a program under our Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and he decided that all the high school students were going to be able to have a job. Have a job.
And what you had to do was propose a project, basically submitted to the government and the government funded it. Pure socialism, as they say. Sounds like madness.
Perhaps it was. I’m sure for the government, it was madness. But everyone got employed.
Everyone. I think in our little village, they had something like 50 people working on the streets, cleaning, young people, right? But in my case, because I was still in high school, we learned to surf.
Yes, surf. You know, you get on the board, you paddle out in the ocean, and you come in. And so, lo and behold, these surfers arrived from Vancouver or somewhere, and the beaches were enormous.
They were, I think, 18 kilometers long. Today, it’s a national park, the Pacific Rim National Park, beautiful part of the world. But at the time, it was very, very primitive.
So, we get on to the beach, and there were these three hippies, if you will, you know, long hair, the whole thing. And they taught me to surf.
And it got to be quite the passion for the summer, you know, and the girls went along and the boys went along. We all learned to surf. And I was pretty good at it.
That’s an activity that you have to focus on something, right? Something you have no choice. Otherwise, you don’t focus on your stance or catching the wave, you know, you will inevitably fall into the water.
So for that time, you’re not thinking about anything but the activity at hand. So maybe that’s part of the secret to having fun, right? Let you focus on something, be it me, baseball, soccer, surfing.
In the last little while, I’ve been playing squash, of all things. It’s a game with a tiny racket, small ball, and you’re inside kind of a court, a box, and you run back and forth, and you hit the ball.
Now, you have no time to contemplate the ilves of the world at that point. You’re too busy running around. So maybe that is fun, of course.
Part of fun is that you focus on the task. In that sense, it’s like, I guess, meditation. You’re focused on your breathing in meditation, normally.
Here you’re focused on the activity at hand, right? Because I think you need to have the brain rest every now and then, right? That’s why Jim Quick talks about in the morning, don’t look at your phone for the first hour or two hours, right?
Just give your brain a rest from all that constant white noise, right?
So you think to yourself, if you went back a hundred years, for instance, 150 years, you probably lived on a farm and you woke up early, but there was silence except for the baying of the animals, the sounds of the animals, et cetera, et cetera.
The birds twittering, peace, right? So the mind, you realize how great art has been created en plein air, as the impression is called, outside painting, right?
You can see how you’re doing an activity and you’re not being suppressed by that sense of white noise. And I really think a lot of people don’t have fun in our busy society.
So if I’m a child, let’s say, and I go to school and then after school, I go to do another activity, like go to cram school or something of our nature, you know, I’m not really allowing my brain to relax.
And I need relaxation of the brain like I need sleep. And I think this is the purpose of fun.
So the next time you’re too busy to undertake an activity, and you have to do something like whatever it is, shopping or something, take yourself away in your imagination to somewhere else, whatever it is. The other day, I was in a shopping center.
And I was, you know, as usual, too busy. And I got my shopping cart, and I pretended that I was a race car driver.
And I was afraid to tell anyone, because at 70 years old, they think you’re crazy with your shopping cart going all over the place, passing people. But it was fun. I laughed at myself.
I thought to myself, if anyone ever saw me do this, and actually listened to why I did it, they would think you were foolish. Right?
So that’s part of maybe the way I attempt to stay youthful, right, is I allow the brain to be imaginative in situations. So look for situation comedy or create it, so that you can have fun.
Allow your brain to relax, because certainly life is not that serious. Of course, at times, it’s deathly serious, as we say. We have to be serious about our careers, our students, or our patients, or whatever it is, right?
There we have to be sincere and serious, right? But sometimes we need to alleviate our mind, our spirit, and just have a bit of fun, because life is ultimately fun. What’s the purpose of life?
Obviously, to be happy. I mean, that’s the ultimate goal. But I’m not happy if I have a lot of money, and I’m 70 or 80 years old, and I’m miserable, I’m Scrooge.
In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, right? He needed dreams to wake him up on Christmas Eve. So he realized that life can be fun, amusing, right?
And rather good. And with that kind of joy, which is ultimately produced by having fun, obviously, you can then go out and be in the world.
And you often wonder to yourself, when you meet older people, not like me, young old, if you will, but like really old, and they are a lot of fun. Why? Because they’re spontaneous, they’re willing to be adventurous, they’re willing to be imaginative.
And many times you could talk to them, you can tell them about your adventures, even if you’re a young person, and they will listen, and they will respond. We need to keep youthful in our mind, because the body will age. You can do all you can.
I do the yoga and the exercise and the squash, as I was saying. But over time, the body will age. Biological, you do your best, right?
But it will age. Keep it healthy, but it’s going to age. But the mind can remain alive, imaginative, and seeking fun, right?
Why not? I flew in a parachute over close to the city I live in, up 300, 400 meters, I think, at one point. Really, very high.
And it was tremendously exciting, but I was really, really fearful at the same time. But it was what I would describe as fun, because I had to focus on the task at hand. So try it.
Make sure that you look for fun in your life. Life’s not all that serious. But of course, sometimes it is, but it cannot be every single moment.
So you think about this, right? And you know what they say. You know what they say.
Critical thinking is excellent, especially if you’re going to look for fun in your life, which of course you’re going to do. And critical thinking is great, truly great. You take care.
God bless. Bye-bye.