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- Are You Actually Living?
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 11 seconds
I want to introduce you to someone special.
Today’s newsletter is written by Mrs Wisdom Made Easy!
Wisdom Made Easy and this newsletter would not exist today without the support of my wife Ute, and today she’s sharing a nugget of wisdom on a topic she knows a lot about: fun.
If you enjoy today’s guest feature, be sure to let Ute and I know by using the poll at the bottom of the email or by replying to this email (I read and reply to every reply).
Now let’s get WISER together!
There are so many things that you can’t control.
But you can control whether you merely endure your days or experience and enjoy them.
You might as well make sure you have true fun along the way.
Who doesn’t love a good venn diagram?
True fun isn’t just playfulness and connection or flow and playfulness, but you need all three happening at once!
It’s that beautiful overlap of all three you’re looking for.
Today’s visual is inspired by Catherine Price.
She’s a strong believer in the following principle:
“We can’t control the fact that we will die. But we can control whether we actually live.”
I sure have had times in my life when I just wanted to make it through the week to the weekend, or just through a specific season.
When times are challenging, hard and stressful, it’s easy to focus on what’s tough or simply wish away the present to merely make it to the other side.
However, you could make it through those hard times and have some fun along the way.
Even if it’s just one evening of snacks and games with friends during a busy season in your life.
One evening can make the whole season not only more bearable, but actually fun and give you something to look forward to.
People that know me would attribute the tagline “so I listened to a podcast the other day and I learned…” to me.
Ologies is one of my favourite podcasts and in this specific episode on Funology, Alie interviews Catherine Price, the author of The Power of Fun: Why Fun Is the Key to a Happy and Healthy Life and How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life amongst others.
In this episode, they discuss how the dictionary definition of fun doesn’t match what true fun feels like.
She hypothesises that true fun is not just lighthearted enjoyment but a confluence of three states:
Playfulness
Connection
Flow
A spirit of playfulness: a playful attitude that you bring to a situation or your life, finding ways to laugh, not taking yourself too seriously, letting down your guard, regardless of what the actual activity is.
Connection: A special shared experience! When people shared truly fun experiences with her the vast majority of them included another person. That was true even for people who described themselves as introverts.
Flow: A state that we get into when we're totally, actively engrossed in something that we're doing, often to the point where you lose track of time.
What she concludes is that true fun is the center of that venn diagram where you have playfulness, connection, and flow all existing at once.
One example for me is when I went on a road trip around Scotland with my sisters a few years ago. We had fun driving around the breathtaking countryside of Glencoe for example, listening to songs we used to listen to when we were teenagers as we drove around for hours simply taking in the beauty of Scotland.
The trip had it all: playfulness of loudly singing along to songs I didn’t even know we’d still know the lyrics to, losing track of time as we looked out the window driving through or wandering around Glencoe all whilst being together and sharing that experience with my sisters.
Do you know when you last experienced true fun?
Consider journaling your responses to the following questions:
Think of a truly fun experience you’ve had. Can you pinpoint the three elements of true fun?
What brings you joy?
How can you create more opportunities for fun in the midst of regular, sad or busy seasons?
Plan an experience that you would find truly fun!
If you’d like to enjoy the podcast that inspired today’s WISER Newsletter?
You can listen to Catherine Price’s feature on the ologies podcast here:
Alternatively, if you’d like to learn more about Catherine’s work, you can learn more about her books here.
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Catch you in the next issue!
Thanks,
Michael