December 16, 2018Fun takes time. You just have to make the sacrifice.
Thinking. It’s a messy process, this Thinking thing. It’s easy to get lost in the word forest. There are no trails, and it’s teeming with new impressions, untested theories, agendas from who-knows-where, all mixed in with detritus and ghosts, all writhing for connection.
We are forensic surgeons here, tinkering inside thought chains. Where are the tendons already? We need tendons to tether these limbs of thought to the spine of the ethos, or else they’ll flop into the void and disappear. So we have to tie up these loose ends, these fresh and tentacled fragments. We can do this. Can’t we? Yes, and we do it better when the methodology includes — fun.
Fun pops up in funny ways. Fun can be driving through the ancient damp southern mountains with a leaf stuck to your windshield.
Rained last night and they say the rain stopped but the rain seems to linger in mid air, filling every highland pocket, everything misted, the old mountain road shines in the wet, and the leaf is still on the windshield.
How is the leaf still on the windshield? Forty-seven miles an hour. Hardly speeding by space age standards, but how can a wet paper-thin leaf go catatonic and adhere to slick glass in a steady stiff forty-seven mile an hour waft, mountains or no mountains?
The leaf is your friend. You are glad the leaf is here, with you, as “here” curves fast-forward across well-tumbled earth. The leaf, with you all the way, every turn, every incline and every down-shiftable descent, yup, it’s you and your leaf buddy. Traveling together. The leaf makes the trip more fun. The leaf makes you wonder how it can still be plastered to the windshield while the wonder spills into the hills and hollers of the southern mountains and the truth is that you have no more idea how the mountains came to be (even if you can toss off terms like orogenic process and igneous intrusion) than why the leaf is on the windshield.
How can it still be there, stuck to the windshield like that? You flash on a “Slippery When Wet” road sign and immediately imagine a “Caution Wet Floor!” sign in a mid-rise office lobby in suburbia and you ask the leaf out loud — breaching the tacit vow of silence between fellow pilgrims — “I thought wet made everything slippery.” And the leaf replies, as if it were totally normal for a leaf to converse in a forty-seven mile an hour airstream, “If you want to clean your kitchen counter, you better use a wet sponge instead of a dry sponge. Get it wet. More stuff sticks to it.”
Which is exactly why it’s fun to cruise the southern mountains with a leaf. On the windshield. You get the mountains in their full four dimensional massive mysticism. And you get the leaf. Hugging the slick glass. And you get to wonder, “Which is it? Are things slippery when wet? Or are things sticky when wet?”
Fun with leaf.
Fun?
Fun, a simple three-letter word, with a simple etymology. It didn’t appear until late in our English language — showed up in the 1700s, when “to fun somebody” meant to take advantage or cheat, in the sense of gamesmanship. Later, it came to mean fun in the sense of light-hearted pastimes and dumb stuff like paying five hundred dollars for the family to chat with a person dressed as a famous mouse while waiting in line for a goofy ride. But I digress.
Ahem.
Admittedly, the Fun Question is debatable. Which is more fun: take everyone to Disney World, or cruise the southern mountains with a leaf stuck to a wet windshield? Reasonable people may certainly espouse nuanced opinions on this vexing question.
Language evolves; perhaps we’re skating ahead of the dictionary with some emergent connotations of the word. Consider that “fun” is a kind of quiet contract: You agree to pay attention and/or money in exchange for some new sensation, thought, or experience.
Well, it’s actually more than that. Fun also implies a release from the ongoing burden of being you. Fun is a zone where you can enjoy being alive while the general pain-in-the-assedness of being alive is temporarily suspended. You shift your inner gears into neutral, in a manner of speaking, and coast with some added frisson of magic liberty while being doused in impressions you don’t have to work for.
Surrendering to the flow of images on a movie screen. Or letting a roller coaster throw you down up and sideways. Or paddling white water or floating above the mesas in a hot air balloon. Or a heightened sense of wonder as a leaf accompanies you on a mountain junket. You name it: anything with the right mix of time and attention and curiosity and pliability can bounce you straight into fun.
The fun thing about fun is that it comes from anywhere. You can pay for it but you don’t have to. A lot of free fun is more fun because you don’t have stand in line or decide if you got your money’s worth and you can quit whenever it gets to be no fun anymore.
And you don’t have to worry about the body. The body knows how to have fun. The body likes being alive. It’s really good at this life thing. And it’s easily entertained. It likes to walk around and move through space and hurl other objects through space, objects like spears and spitballs and boomerangs and water balloons. The body likes to dance and see other bodies dance. The body likes to eat and feast and run and yell.
The body and Thinking appear to have little in common. Yet upon closer scrutiny, with the help of a good translator, we find some similarities. The body likes a good feast, and Thinking loves a good feast, too. And here’s where the translator comes in, because Thinking feasts in a very different way. While the body feasts and finds fun in the familiar, Thinking comes more alive in the new — new impressions, new information, new prisms of insight. The mind is refreshed when it cavorts where it’s never been before. The good news is, the body has plenty of room for its repetitions, and the mind has infinite space for invention.
The leaf is still on the windshield. And the question lingers: is moisture slippery or sticky?
