Have Fun!

“Busy-ness does not make us happy. Muller reminds us that the Chinese symbol for busy is composed of two characters: heart and killing.“

-From ‘The Trouble With Motherhood,’ by Christine Carter, PhD. April 26, 2010, http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/raising_happiness/post/the_trouble_with_motherhood.

That just about sums up my mother’s day message: busy-ness kills our hearts. I read Christine Carter’s blog entry over the weekend and it shocked my eyes wide open. Of course I already knew that preoccupation with daily chores, errands and classes sucks the life out of a person – don’t we all know that? But I did not know that someone made a study out of it, and proved that people can only live without fun for two days before they start to fall apart with anxiety disorder, headaches, sleeplessness, etc (see her article above for details about this experiment, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as described in his book Flow.)

It is both hilarious and horrifying to me that many moms are willing to live their lives as a sort of experiment in productivity without diversion. Purposefulness without playfulness apparently robs us of our mental and physical health, which of course takes away from our effectiveness in all areas of our life. The best part of Carter’s article tells us that life does not have to be this way; if we take time to insert non-productive fun in our schedule, our happiness level will increase (and probably our productivity, too, but at this point who cares?).

I often feel that fun activities are those I enjoy by myself. For example, I just finished a 12-mile bike ride on this sunny, windy day – startled periodically by delirious woodpeckers and sunbathing prairie dogs. (Two of the prairie dogs were sprawled out on the trail – I thought they were dead until they jumped up and scurried for cover. They looked just like my friends and I when we baked as teenagers – even down to the body types!) Now that was fun . . . as my four-year- old would say, “Wahoo Daddo!”

But I also had a fantabulous time over the weekend on a mother-daughter campout at the zoo. Eleven girls and their moms got to spend an evening (including dinner and zoo walk), conspiratorial night of little sleep, and morning together. The girls’ electric chatter and wide-eyed wonder spread contagiously even to us yawny moms. You would think the lights of Colorado Springs, spread out below us, were fireworks on the Seine. A monkey zonked out overhead in a swing, a snoring gorilla, and a raucous peacock squawking from high in a tree; all these were sources of giggles and rapid-fire questions. We even fed giraffes: great, tall beautiful animals that clustered around us looking for crackers, their long black tongues snaking around all the bars of their enclosure, and the girls’ hair when they dared place crackers on their heads.

So much fun to be had . . .I am, in fact, going to put “have fun” on my list of 5-year goals. At the moment this list has items like: “be patient,” “be calm,” “be peaceful,” which all frankly sound good but boring. I think fun should be – if not first – at least prominently listed. To quote my little guy again, without fun, “you be in the trouble, mommo.” Have fun on Mother’s Day, everyone!