Be Fun.

I came across a fascinating piece of writing recently. It piqued my interest because it connects to yoga and movement. Not in an overt way, but in a covert way. It’s about fun. If you’re wondering how that relates to yoga and movement well, we are more likely to return to movement when our brains find it interesting and fun. We learn better and quicker when the think we are learning involves play. As a movement teacher I have taken this to heart and felt it be true on a nervous system level. Here it is, by Megan Palmer:

The definition of the word fun is: (noun) what provides amusement or joy, (verb) to indulge in banter or play, (adjective) providing entertainment, amusement, or enjoyment. I hadn’t read any of those definitions before, but they all seem to fall flat in the face of the thing we search for with the same unquenchable vigor as happiness. Fun is the quirky younger sibling of happiness; less heavy, more attainable, showing its face at times when we least expect it and concealing itself at times where we’re depending on its arrival. By this definition, fun requires a level of spontaneity to exist. This explains why most people are finding it impossible to have fun during the pandemic when we’ve been stripped of the freedom that comes with making unbridled decisions. To quote Travis Tae, a professor who has been studying fun for the past five years,

“It’s different from other emotional or affective terms. You never say you ‘have sadness.’ But we frame fun as coming from somewhere else, which gives it unique commercial potential.”

This characterization feels partially involuntary, as though having fun is something we aren’t able to control if only because it requires a level of randomness to achieve, similar to the way we talk about love. We “have” fun and we “fall” in love; neither experience is framed as a voluntary choice. Instead, they are occurrences that happen to us. We cannot force ourselves to have fun the same way we cannot strong-arm our way into falling in love, and it is this uncontrollable nature that makes both experiences extraterrestrial. Our desire to dictate the outcomes of every situation is irrelevant in the worlds of fun and love, and this rare, beautiful loss of control is liberating. In our most fun memories and in our deepest loves, we were swept up and away from ourselves, whether we liked it or not.