Follow the Fun!!
A permission slip to start our summer :-)
Hello fellow learn-it-all 👋 Greetings from Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Now, let’s dive into letter 316 from a learn-it-all. Enjoy!
❓Question to think about
How has life felt fun?
Captured this on my sunset stroll last night while watching these girls have so much fun. The energy was infectious.
🖊️Writing
Last Friday, after publishing Dear Screens, I went offline for my “Mindful May ritual”. A container I’ve created the past four years to go inward. I thought I’d take a train up to an island called Terschelling, where my tante Adri was born, but the seven accommodations I reached out to fell through. It’s odd how good I am getting at reading rejections in all languages. And now in Dutch I know “helaas” is not a fun word to read.
So instead, I realized what my spirit really needed, apart from chunks of mindful moments in silence, was two mere intentions: an ocean dip and a forest bath.
On Saturday, when I woke up, I ate a big breakfast with an uitsmijter, or eggs on an open-faced cheese sandwich. Then I packed some snacks from the Jumbo and was off on my adventure due west to the sea. I felt like Captain Jack Sparrow using my signs as a compass to determine which way was west after I cycled through Westerpark.
When I got to the beach, I opened the letter I wrote to myself on a plane from Florida to Michigan over two months ago. It’s something that I serendipitously found while rummaging through letters in my desk. This discovery was a delight and felt like Christmas Eve. On the back of the letter, I left a list of eleven questions for my future self to answer.
The tenth question was: “How has life felt fun?”
I sat there, lounging back, sand in my toes at Bloemendaal aan Zee for a few moments. I heard a young Vietnamese boy balling after licking his chocolate ball of ice cream off his cone, a dad doing circle with a soccer ball around his diapered daughter, anklebiter dogs panting with passion with their tongues hanging to the side, another diaperless daughter hanging from her dad’s forearm like an orangutan.
No “fun things” jumped to my mind. I felt absentminded. I had to really think about it. Why wasn’t something coming to me quicker? I noticed self-judgment in this moment: Why am I not having more fun?
I feel like when something feels implicitly fun, and I follow that, I’m more likely to keep going. Whereas the things I “should” do quietly burn me out, like how I felt like I had to pursue a muckety-muck career with my finance degree. When the choice feels robbed, so does the fun. In order to have fun, we need to feel free. And that’s the other thing, we also need to feel. To not be in our heads and get into our bodies and actually USE the five senses we are gifted.
Having fun isn’t something that can be planned cerebrally. Even when planning a party, it can be easy to get caught up in all the frontal-lobed things, of sending invites, cleaning, preparing food. And then I could forget the whole point of why I’m even doing this thing on the weekend.
And I recognize that having fun requires spaciousness. It’s an energy that needs to be coaxed out and invited to play. It’s not something that is usually forced,
Even a weekend full of good things can tip into obligation when the calendar gets too packed. Fun needs room to breathe. I wrote in Dear Baby Jen in a Bucket that,” The saying goes, “Sink or swim,” but what about floating along and following the fun?
Fun can take many shapes and forms, like mispronouncing Dutch words (graag) or holding my salsa partner’s hand with too floppy of a spaghetti arm so they can’t lead me properly, or getting a little bit lost cycling to the beach and befriending someone to ask “waar is de strand naar Haarlem?”
I believe that our attention is like the aperture of the camera of our life. We can choose to focus on certain things in the frame and blur out others. And now I am choosing to focus the aperture of my life on the fun things.
It’s fun to have fun.
Here are 30 ways I’ve witnessed fun lately:
Listening to a favorite playlist while biking to a playdate
Writing in a different color pen
Gifting a new friend a poem to make them smile
Making a new dish with a new type of cheese
Wearing braids in a bandana, feeling like Rosie the Riveter
Brewing a bubbly bath
Telling stories while gluing scraps on paper
Squealing while jumping into the river
Making animal sounds in a sauna
Interviewing a new classmate in Dutch about their autobiographie
Messing up the bread slicer at the Lidl grocery store and laughing with a stranger
Humming to the “I want to be in America” song from West Side Story while cycling home from Salsa
Collapsing off a wall while bouldering
Cracking each other’s backs
A photoshoot laying in flowers
A silly hat that gets passed around a party
Pompom earrings that feel like recess on a summer day
Making sun tea on the terrace
A scoop of pistachio ice cream melting down your cone
A doggy in a bike bucket excited to adventure
Beach towels drying in the sun
Creating an anklet your wear with your fave colors
Pancakes baked with apple and a pinch of cinnamon
Adding to a leftover meal with whatever smorgasbord is in the veggie bowl
Stalking the neighborhood’s newly hatched mama swan’s goslings
A photography workshop and then a photoshoot at golden hour
Throwing a playful pup’s rubber chicken to fetch
Bopping to Dancing Queen while cycling the canals to Bible Study
Watching the wild house cats out on the streets at dusk looking for some ruckus
Indulging in frites with new friends
The fun stuff is usually a delight and a surprise. Sure, I can plan to write, and that feels fun, but when you schedule fun, sometimes the scheduling takes the fun out of it.
Usually, the best fun sneaks in as an attack on an ordinary day, and it’s up to us to notice it and see it as fun.
Keep following the fun!!
Your turn
Gameify your life and see how it can be more fun because why not?!
30 ideas by your truly (while skipping down the street :)
Do a grapevine in the middle of a run
Wander around a bookstore or thrift store for treasure, like old books
Run in the rain and see how alive it feels
Look up the history of a word, or how to say it in a new language
Open up to a random page of a book and see what resonates
See how many words you can get to rhyme with your favorite word (don’t choose orange b/c it’ll be a short list)
Do a cannonball into the water and see how big a splash you can make
Wear the cheetah glasses that make you feel a little extra
Buy a variation of a food on your grocery list like goat cheese
See if you remember how to make a fishtail or a five-strand braid
Tie a bowline knot behind your back in the dark
Take a bath in the dark or with a cool light or candle
Eat food with your eyes closed
See how many planes or birds you can count in the sky
Play eye spy while people watching and see who is wearing a color you fancy
Compliment the person next to you at the cafe on their effortless chic outfit
Buy some silly socks
Trim your lavender plant and put the dried flowers into a sachet in your sock drawer
See how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop
Invent your own song when you forget the words to the song you were singing
Wrap your arms around a tree with your toes on the ground and breathe
Chat with the birds
Whip your hair back and forth like you just don’t care
Play a new card game like “ball sack” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Buy some chalk and express yourself on the streets
Explore a new artist and listen to their first album, then their last one
Buy some boba tea and play with the tapioca texture
Ask a friend for their favorite movie and watch it and let them know your honest review
Curate a playlist of music that makes you smile and just wanna jiggle :)
See how stark a watch tan you can make on your wrist
📖 Reading
From When To Do What You Love written by Paul Graham, the essayist, entrepreneur and co-founder of Y-Combinator:
“The odds are better when you have strange tastes: when you like something that pays well and that few other people like. For example, it’s clear that Bill Gates truly loved running a software company. He didn’t just love programming, which a lot of people do. He loved writing software for customers. That is a very strange taste indeed, but if you have it, you can make a lot by indulging it.“
🗂️ From the Archives
In Letter 179 I wrote: “I tend to struggle with being mediocre at things or doing them just for fun — I end up taking sports too seriously. But I think with volleyball, I’m ready to go from a dabbler to an intermediate. Why not? Maybe it will become more fun.”
In Letter 71, I noted that longevity in work comes from “feeling like you are in power of your work and actively participating in the choice to have it,” rather than being coerced by an environment that undercuts your well-being.
🔍Word to define
Fun (n.)
Before it meant delight or play, fun was a low thing. Around 1700, it meant a cheat, a trick, a hoax — a close cousin to the Middle English fonnen, to befool. Samuel Johnson, that great arbiter of proper English, called it “a low cant word” and wanted nothing to do with it. It took nearly a century for fun to shed its disreputable origins and mean something closer to what we mean now: diversion, amusement, mirthful sport.
I love that Fun had to fight for its respectability. That it started as something a little suspicious, a little subversive. That the serious people didn’t trust it.
Maybe they still don’t. Maybe that’s the point.
(source: etymologyonline)
🇳🇱 Dutch Word
Plezier (n.) — fun, pleasure, enjoyment
The Dutch use this one constantly. Veel plezier! (Have lots of fun!) is what someone calls after you as you head out the door. It’s warm and generous, the verbal equivalent of a send-off wave.
What I find interesting is that plezier comes from the French plaisir, to please, which goes all the way back to the Latin placere, to be agreeable, to give satisfaction. Fun, in Dutch, has its roots in a fundamentally relational pleasure. Something that pleases. Something shared.
My Calvinist ancestors, with their one hot meal and their single offered cookie, probably kept their plezier close to the chest. I like to think I’m expanding the family tradition.
🌟Quote to Inspire
“The most mature human beings are also childlike. That is not as contradictory as it sounds. The most mature people are the ones who can have the most fun. They are able to regress at will; they can become childish and play with children and be close to them. It is no accident, I think, that children generally tend to like them and get along with them. Involuntary regression is of course a very dangerous thing; but voluntary regression seems to be characteristic of very healthy people.”
— Abraham Maslow, psychologist on maturity, Source: Emotional Blocks to Creativity (found via James Clear via Dylan O’Sullivan)
📸Photos of the Week
shared above :)
🙏Shoutouts
To my Aunt Lindy for creating a song to my poem that I published a couple of weeks ago, “The Silly Goose Lands”. It’s quite catchy and you might find yourself humming to it. I am glad it sounds like it was a fun little project for her. Listen here.
I am grateful you chose to fill part of your day here.
If something in this letter resonated, press the ❤️ , leave a comment, reply to this email, or reach me at vermetJL@gmail.com. I love hearing from you.
Keep on learning 😁
Tot snel 🌺 🌺
Toodles :)
Jen
P.S. - I wrote a book. Letters to My Life is my favorite way to share my writing with you (and it keeps your screen-time stats down). Grab your copy here.
P.P.S. - Here’s what you missed. Last week, I wrote about my on-again, off-again love affair with screens