crazy fun
A couple of days ago, I asked my friend Chad if he was still keeping up with his one-second-a-day video compilations. It’s an app that prompts you to take daily videos, and then to string one-second clips together into a montage. It’s really something, what you can tell about a person’s life and times in seeing just one second a day.
Anyway, Chad said that, yes, in fact he is keeping up with them and has been for about two full years now. He sent me his one-second-a-day montage from his summer of travel with his wife, Kate (a video that came in at under two minutes long). What I saw intermixed with more serene moments or breathtaking scenery was lots of smiles, raucous laughter, belly flops onto beds, practical jokes.
I suggested to Chad that he should use these short videos in some of his presentations, simply showing the video and then asking people: “Never mind for now what you just saw in those out-of-context moments. What did you feel while watching that video?”
Chad thought this was a good idea. But in typical Chad form, he turned my own question on me: “What did you feel while watching it, Erik?”
I told him that I felt “uplifted, curious, like I wanted to be there.” But in that moment, I also had an unexpected yet important personal revelation:
I’m not fun.
Actually, that’s not accurate. I am fun. I know how to have fun. I love to have fun. I’m just not having fun.
No, that’s not quite it, either. I’m having fun – I’m just not having a certain kind of fun.
Crazy fun.
I’ll see if I can explain.
I enjoy my life. I’m never bored.
Just recently, I had a certain kind of “fun” on a wonderful vacation. I had plenty of time to read (fantasy, my relaxation genre) and eat tangy lime pops and see some good movies. And I would not be lying to say I had “fun” doing these things. But it was "solitary fun," and that’s a different kind of fun than what I mean.
I certainly ventured out and talked with people. I had some really cool interactions. I got to speak with people in three different languages other than my native language; and that is “fun” for me. It’s a challenge and it excites me. But it’s not quite what I mean by “fun” today.
In fact, much of my life is about choices to engage with the world in ways that I really do enjoy. In a very real sense, having deep conversations is “fun” for me. Solving problems is “fun.” Even right now, as I write, I’m enjoying myself. It’s “fun.” But again, my epiphany of a few days ago concerned a different kind of fun than these things.
I’m talking about crazy fun. Tear-inducing fun. Adrenaline-pumping fun. Milk-out-the-nose kind of fun. Cheeks-feeling-like-you-blew-up-too-many-balloons kind of fun.
I’m a creative guy. And not much if anything embarrasses me. So I’m pretty darned comfortable being silly. I wrote in The Best Advice So Far (and in a prior post) about times when I’ve laughed myself right into a near conniption, crumpled in a useless heap on the floor. Those times have been many.
I’m the type who can take a practical joke to the extreme, enjoying the plotting as much as the elaborate execution.
I love having inside jokes with a friend over the most ridiculous of things, and then getting each other going, mounting on the ridiculousness until we’re both howling or neither of us can speak at all.
I’m the type to drive to the beach in the middle of a wild downpour and just run around getting soaked.
I’m usually the first to pose (or take) the dare, with brazen eyes and a stalwart resolve.
But what I realized this week … is that I haven’t had this kind of silly, crazy fun in a while. Somehow, I’ve let “serious fun” completely replace the childlike kind.
And that’s not good.
Some of you think I’m off my rocker right now. You’re wondering why any adult would feel that silliness, mattress dives, water gun fights, laughing with wild abandon or the like should be done on the regular – or, moreover, why they might actually be important.
All I can tell you is this. I know how I feel when these things are a part of my life. And I can recognize the “something missing” when they are not. I know how awake and alive and creative and connected I feel when I share these kinds of moments with people, as opposed to when I’ve gone too long without.
Need something more scientific? OK. Then I challenge you to run an experiment of your own. Join me in adding some crazy fun back into your life. Collect the data. And then decide for yourself if the additions were worthwhile.
As children, we knew the secrets to joy and laughter and big self-expression – knowledge we tend to forget or leave by the wayside as we get older. But I’ve never been able for the life of me to understand why we would abandon the better parts of ourselves for drudgery or perpetual seriousness. I’ll take this opportunity to say once more, being childlike does not mean being childish or irresponsible.
From ancient times, the wise knew that “laughter is the best medicine.” I’m overdue for a good dose of crazy fun. How about you?
kermit
My seventeen-year friendship with Bud and Dib got off to a fast and furious start. The first day I met them, we had lunch. And for the next year or two, I was at their house nearly every night until 2:00 AM. Often, it was more like 3:30. And we had jobs!
Bud would usually be the first to fade, which made for great fun as Dib and I put various objects -- not all of them edible – into his slack mouth, holding our hands over our own mouths as we silently cracked up. It seemed no matter how late it got, we'd get our fingers out like a first grader doing math, and count off how many hours of sleep we could still get if we only stayed up another half hour.
And then, of course, I had the 40-minute drive home. How we managed such hours is a mystery to me, only explicable by the dim notion that we must have been very young once.
One such occasion lives on in particular infamy. On that night, a new phrase was coined, one which has defined many a moment since.
It was well past the 3:00 mark, while exchanging the usual prolonged goodbyes in the kitchen, when it happened. My eyes glazed over, and I began to sway, an idiot's vapid grin taking over my face. The last thing I really remember while standing was Dib's eyes widening as her mouth formed words in slow motion. "Oh boy..."
Then I was down. On the floor in a ball. Giggling maniacally. It was really more like screeching, if I'm being completely honest. Whatever it was, it robbed me of breath, of motor control. Of sanity.
Bud and Dib crouched over me with a mixture of concern and fascination, like city folk watching a horse give live birth for the first time. Every word they said to try to elicit a response from me seemed like the funniest joke I'd ever heard. The only response I could manage for the first five or ten minutes was peals of laughter, interrupted only by my body's self-protective measures as it struggled to keep my breathing.
You see, a mental picture had formed in my mind. Well, it sort of took over my mind. It isn't even that funny from where I sit now. But in that moment, for whatever reason, it was all there was in the universe. I was in the throes of it. I drifted through the expanse of it. It had me in its grip. Hard.
Over the course of – and I'm really not exaggerating – the next thirty minutes, I eeked out an explanation in one- or two-word pants, the laughter mounting to shrieks, my face and hair completely soaked with tears. I hurt everywhere, which also seemed somehow indescribably funny to me in that state. Pain! Funny! Yes!
Enter the fun house of my deranged imagination – if you dare.
In my mind's eye, I was standing at a hall closet door. I was compelled to open the door, though I knew I probably shouldn't. But I did. Immediately, the weight of whatever lay inside bore against the door, forcing it open toward me. I tried and tried to shut Pandora's Box, but the force mounted against me. After a few more seconds, the closet burst open, and an endless pile of Kermit the Frog dolls flew down on top of me. Each Kermit landed with its own little *squeak* – somewhere between the sound of a bike horn and a dog's chew toy. An interminable, squeaking rain of Kermits was burying me alive.
You can imagine my shock and dismay. Of course, this was all in my mind. But it was hysterical all the same. Really riotous stuff, I tell you.
That is the picture I saw – the mental image that might have ended a less stalwart friendship. Thereafter, that special place in the wee hours, where any and everything becomes side-splittingly amusing, has been dubbed "Kermit's Closet." No sooner do the eyes glass over than Dib will shake her head and say, "Oh boy, watch out. Kermit's Closet is opening."
One of my favorite questions to ask people is "When was the last time you laughed so hard that you cried and your stomach hurt?" It's astonishing to know just how many people really can't remember the last time. That's a shame. My last time was this afternoon, joking with Chad while we had "office hours" for the Clown Nose Club.
The time before that, was this morning. All by myself. I'd had a ridiculous dream that I was a German wrestler. The stakes were high. It was all very serious in the dream. But when I woke up, the juxtaposition with reality had me in stitches for a solid minute. Great way to start the day.
They say that laughter is the best medicine. There are countless studies to support the truth of this old adage. And that begs the question, what kind of funk does our soul wind up contracting if we don't take our medicine?
Laughter is cathartic. It keeps things in perspective. It prevents us from taking ourselves too seriously. I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to brave Kermit's Closet (though it is a fun visit). But I can personally vouch for the benefits of learning to laugh, and doing it often.