Sunday Night With John: Don’t Under Estimate Fun

I had 150 pages to finish reading, a paper to finish writing, a blog to write, and a training to facilitate most of the day Saturday and Sunday. Despite the mountain of work I had to accomplish, I emailed my wife on Friday afternoon and requested to go out on the town later after work. No, it wasn’t my procrastination kicking in, (I have pretty much kicked the habit) and it wasn’t the, “I work better under pressure,” excuse (even though I will make this excuse till the day I die).  It was because I think we forget how much fun, fun really is. 

We started our evening with a walk of our ten-month-old puppy around town. This is where Anne, my wife, sings made up songs as we walk around town.  It’s like I’m living in a musical. And we ended our night talking with another couple about playing the board game Risk, but with real live people acting as the game pieces. This sounds like a terrible idea now, but at the time it created laughter around our table.  I should also mention that the couple participating in the conversation was a couple we had just meet two hours prior to our Risk game conversation unfolding. It was down pouring as we left the establishment and dashed to the car.  We were absolutely soaked but I couldn’t help but smile and think about how happy I was.  We had fun. It’s a feeling we take for granted, one we often don’t allow ourselves to express or feel for too long. We can sometimes act like if we are too happy things will go horribly wrong.  Or we aren’t working hard enough towards the next goal in life if we don’t have our serious face on.

It’s an odd concept in our culture where feeling happy must be fleeting and if we are too happy we aren’t serious enough about life. I wonder why our society has tilted this way?  Do you feel it, too? I don’t have an answer to question but I assume it’s because we always feel like we have to reach the next promotion, the next salary milestone, or grind it out for the next life goal. I don’t normally think about happiness in this way as I have worked through depression and know how valuable happiness can be. I see friends, co-workers, and strangers struggle with the emotion of happy just as much as they struggle with the emotion of deep sadness. Let me be the first to tell you, there is nothing wrong with being happy all day or all week.   Stretch happiness out for a month if you can, I dare you.

I got cracking on Saturday with my to-do list but not before Anne and I spent twenty minutes watching and dancing to a stupid, weird and entertaining music video causing laughter to erupt all through our house. You can check out the video by just clicking play below. 

I’ll just bet that we can chase our next goal while not letting go of happiness, we can hold a smile ten seconds longer, we can laugh a lot louder.  To be honest, I don’t think anyone on his or her deathbed has uttered the phrase, “I regret having too much fun, I was too happy all the time.”