Is the Wrong Kind of Fun Making You Fat?

A terrific and provocative piece in the New York Times yesterday:  food columnist Mark Bittman demolished the sacred cow that junk food is cheaper than healthy food, a belief that is often invoked to explain why so many Americans eat it and thus are fat.  First he shows that reasonably economical home-cooking is cheaper than even McDonalds.  Next he demonstrates that home-cooked meals can be as or more calorie dense than fast food, even presuming that is what one is seeking in a world where we consume too many calories.  Third, while he acknowledges that there are “food deserts” in low-income neighbourhoods, he suggests that 93% of low-income dwellers therein have at least access to a vehicle, so could get to a supermarket to buy food.  Finally, he even takes apart the idea that we don’t have time to cook, stating that the average American watches 90 minutes of television a day, regardless of their income, some of which could easily be redirected towards cooking. Bittman suggests that the real barrier to cooking healthy food at home is that we perceive it as work, and that, by comparison, fast food is “a pleasure and a crutch”.   There is a physical pleasure to fast food, one which scientists and critics have warned is quite literally addictive, but there is also the fact that fast-food companies have created and attached a “carnival” of pleasure to their food by making it ubiquitous, instantaneous, mobile and playful.  In other words, fast-food is perfect expression of our technological age, all wrapped up in a big bow of accessibility and fun.

Bittman argues that “real cultural changes are needed to turn this around”, but that the “smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.”  The tricky bit is how.  Bittman says that we need political change, but the rest lies with us.  We should “cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival.”

Those of us who cook do tend to find it fun:  no doubt that’s part of the reason we do it.  But it’s worth asking if there are ways that we can increase the fun, not only for our own pleasure, but to be the kind of models for which Bittman is calling.  It’s not just about competing with fast-food, it’s about celebrating a core part of our existence.  Ironically, given that we consume our food, cooking and eating are modes of engagement that can lie outside of the ruthless production/consumption model that characterizes so much of the rest of our lives.  Cooking and eating are about creativity, connection to the natural world, experimentation, bonding with other people, thanksgiving and pure sensual delight.  And frankly, I’ve never been one to think that it only “counts” if you’re eating with others.  When I lived alone, I was always very happy cooking for myself, investigating new ingredients, trying new things, filling my apartment with good smells and actually enjoying the fact that I was taking care of myself.

So what are the ways that we can reengage with the joy of cooking?  Here are five ideas:

1. Embrace the sensuality of cooking.  Come on, this is good.  Really look at the deep purple skins of eggplant, the rich coral of salmon, or the pink piping on borlotti beans.  Inhale the scents of turmeric, lime, wild mushrooms or melting chocolate.  Feel the springy resilience of kale, the slipperiness of fresh scallops, the soft flesh of a peach.  You get the picture, but if you need inspiration, watch Like Water for Chocolate or Babette’s Feast.
2. Screw being a master chef.  Cooking is one of those things that some people invest a lot of time in, not just because they like it, but because it becomes part of their identity.  Notwithstanding Iron Chef or whatever the show is, cooking is not a competitive sport.  It’s life.  Embrace peasant food.  Embrace the possibility of the failure that can come with experimentation (my personal nadir was artichoke soup that cost a fortune, took hours, and was basically unsalvageable despite buckets of wine and cream.  My favourite memory of that though, is my dear friend Lori still insisting it was good.  I love her still for that).  Embrace being really great at a couple of things, and having fun with a whole lot more.
3. Have rituals.  I know, eventually an anthropologist was going to talk about rituals, but rituals are a way of marking special time, and transforming routine into something more profound.  They’re deeply human.  Rituals of thanksgiving, be they grace, or having each person at the table say something to honour the food, remind us of what our food connects us too.  But even the simple ritual of lighting candles at the start of the meal makes the time special.
4. Play.  No, this doesn’t mean playing with your food.  This means experimenting with new ingredients or cuisines, making wacky substitutions if so inclined, lovingly following your favourite cookbook authors (I have a thing for both Nigella Lawson and Nigel Slater), collecting period cookbooks…whatever works for you.  And it means using the sacred time and space of the table to engage playfully with others.  Laurie David has some great ideas in The Family Dinner and it’s also worth asking your parents and grandparents what traditions they might have had that you can try again.
5. Mix things up.  There is little in life as fun as establishing rules and then breaking them.  Look at the perennial fun of Mardi Gras or cross-dressing!  Figure out which cooking and table “rules” you need to maintain, and which you might enjoy breaking now and then.  Eat dessert first.  Pick one favourite ingredient and base an entire menu around it (I wouldn’t suggest goose though, at least, it didn’t work out so well for me).  Eat breakfast for dinner.  Have everyone come to the table in their pyjamas, or evening clothes, or in costume.  I do believe that one should always be respectful of one’s food, but beyond that, it’s fun to play self-consciously with the rules that govern all the “should” and “oughts” of our existence.

These are but a few ideas, based on what we know generates fun and pleasure.  Let’s do it.  Let’s reinvent the joy of cooking.  We’ll all be happier, healthier and skinnier as a result.

In Praise of My Cocktail Shaker, or “What Would Noël Coward do?” (Part One)

The proverbial cocktail hour draws nearer, and I find my thoughts turning with affection to my cocktail shaker.  Tonight:  a Gimlet.  There are two good reasons for this choice.   The first is that we are somehow out of vermouth (an alarming situation that I think is the result of my newfound devotion to using it in cooking), which means that a Martini is out of the question.  The second is that there is just something inherently fun about Gimlets.  The name is irresistible for a start:  say it out loud and see if it doesn’t make you smile.  They are also fun to make.  I will get out my battered but beloved cocktail shaker, uncork the gin (I have a thing for Hendricks at the moment, thus the cork), pour in a trace of Rose’s Lime Cordial, crack the ice cube tray and shake, shake, shake, all the while feeling the cocktail shaker grow almost unbearably cold in my hands.  My children find the process hilarious:  I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps there’s a sort of theatre to it, or perhaps I just look a bit silly manhandling the shaker until it’s done its work.  Whatever the case at the end of it all, voila!  The Gimlet.  A pale green, silvery sweet-sharp delicious little delight to ease in the dinner hour.

It’s actually fascinating that there is so much fun to be had making things, in this case a before dinner drink, yet in our convenience culture, we habitually value not having to make things.  Having things ready-made suggests a freedom to enjoy the thing itself independent of any burdensome process of creation, and also being free to move on to the next “thing” more quickly, whatever that may be.  And, of course, sometimes convenience feels like necessity:  it’s hard to get excited about creating dinner - let alone cocktails - when one walks in the door at 6:30 and has to conjure dinner out of thin air for a hungry family, help with homework, manoeuvre kids up to the bath, etc..  This is of course what legions of marketers tell us daily:  why waste our precious time cooking, when they can so solicitously provide for us, leaving us free to…well, what exactly?  The original promise of technology suggested that labour-saving devices (which we’ll extend to convenience food and drinks here) would free up time so time for mind and soul-enriching leisure;  the reality though, is that most of us use all that extra time to work, or rather, we have to work, so we’re grateful that all those labour-saving devices help us keep it all going.  The problem though, is that in practice, it all adds up to less fun rather than more, because fun is in the process, not simply the endpoint.

But back to the humble Gimlet.  It takes less than five minutes to make;  not so long really, but I wonder if the true effort involved here isn’t really the time, but rather the mental discipline to step out of my get-dinner-on-the-table-for-the-kids mode.  That takes a sometimes Herculean act of will, a sense that life is right now and is about fun as much as it is rolling efficiently through my routine.  But if I let myself ask, “What would Noël Coward do?”, then I’m cheerfully liberated to take the shaker down off the shelf.

This actually isn’t a facetious comment.  It’s not just that Coward always made time for cocktails (although I suspect maybe he did), it’s that he stands for a life in which someone can be staggeringly productive and involved with serious real-world issues, in his case the British war effort, and still live with an apparent lightness and pleasure.  It’s the epitome of a switched-on life.  You have fun living, rather than pushing some idea of fun into the corners of life, something to be got to when all the daily demands are done.  In the process, you actually wind up more engaged, creative and alive.

Now this is the point where I should tell you my recipe for Gimlets, but the reality is that I’m such a drink dilettante, I don’t even have one.  So here’s what I do:  load the cocktail shaker up with ice, pour in the teensiest splash of Rose’s Lime Cordial, pour in a rather heftier measure of gin, shake for dear life.  I drink mine out of teeny little martini glasses, of which more in Part Two.  Evidently, one can also make Gimlets with real lime juice and a bit of syrup, which I’m sure would also be tasty.  Some recipes call for an appalling amount of lime cordial.  This might work if you like sweet drinks, but alas not for my alarming palate.

Take five minutes to let a bit of lime in your life:  once, so the legend goes, they used it ward off scurvy;  let’s use it now to switch-on.

10 Reasons to Love Farmer's Markets

Delighted to say that I’m doing another guest blog today on Laurie David and Kirstin Uhrenholdt’s site The Family Dinner.  I hope you come over to read it, and I hope you find yourself enjoying a fresh peach or apple at a farmers' market near you soon!

Big Weather

Who doesn’t feel a frisson of excitement and aliveness when a great clap of thunder cracks right overhead? An incredible storm struck Georgian Bay just hours before we were supposed to leave the cottage.  It started with the low rumble of distant thunder and an ominous mass of cloud in the west.  Still, I watched the clouds bank without concern:  they were far enough away that I figured I still had plenty of time to pack and go for a swim before anything happened.  Then I went outside to shake sand out of a towel and my jaw dropped when I saw the tower of black clouds right overhead, and stretching as far into the south as I could see.  So much for an early departure:  the storm had its own agenda.

I scurried inside and shut the south-facing windows.  As I did so, the mass of clouds passed in front of the sun and in seconds it was so dark it might as well have been night time.  There was a gentle growl from the heavens, and then BOOM, thunder cracked so loudly it made the house shake.  We happily gave in to the storm, pulling the heavy dining table chairs over to windows to get a front row seat as the storm rolled through the small bay.  Next the rain let loose, and the horizon disappeared into a blur of grey lake and sky.  The rain fell so heavily that it bounced off the water, creating a sense that the lake itself was alive.

This was no one hit wonder:  cell after cell rolled over us.  Finally, there was a bit of a break in the thunder, and I realized that if I had any chance of a swim, this was it.  I looked at the sky;  I looked at the lake.  I wanted that lake like you wouldn’t believe:  the last swim of summer!  But I didn’t fancy getting electrocuted.  Not a good example of smart-thinking to leave behind for my children, plus…I’d be dead.   I hurriedly got into my bathing suit, then stepped outside into the still pouring rain and tried to hear if there was hint of thunder.  I didn’t hear anything, but then it was hard to hear anything over the rain.

Had to chance it.  Heart racing, I made my way over the wet rock and down to the beach.  I thought the water might feel warm compared to the cold rain, but not a chance:  it was freezing.  I started laughing to myself.  It was so great!  I dove in and sliced through the cold water, feeling totally alive.  I came up, exhilarated, and was peppered by rain.  I felt like I could stay in forever, but knew that I ought to get out before the next cell hit in earnest.  Rolling over in the water, I figured I’d swim to the dock, which was a decent, but not self-indulgent, distance.

I was halfway there when I heard thunder again.  It sounded pretty far away, but it was clearly not the time to be in the water after all.  I’d come too far to go back, so swam on as fast as I could.  I reached the ladder safely, inhaled the smell of the wet cedar, and hauled myself out with no small amount of regret.

Watching the storm, and even briefly tasting it with my rainy swim, made me feel totally alive.  An hour later, when the sun was out and the only remains of the storm were a few puddles in the smooth rocks, it felt like the whole thing had been a dream, yet that current of excitement and life lasted in me for hours.

Afterwards, I was thinking why storms are such an assured way of creating this feeling.  After all, they can be a complete pain too.  I’ve been snowed into places and snowed out of places;  I’ve had umpteen flights cancelled or delayed leaving me longing for home while stuck on tarmacs, in lounges or in crummy airport hotels;  I’ve had terrifying drives where visibility was so bad I could only follow the taillights of the person in front of me and hope for the best; I’ve lost power for hours and sweltered in awful heat; and, when I was General Manager for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival in Edmonton, we even had to cancel a show due to a tornado!  And of course these really just amount to inconveniences:  storms can be truly devastating and even fatal, as we’ve seen so brutally around the globe in the last several years and even just this week.

And yet the storms themselves are exciting.  The mindset most of us live with is framed by a technological paradigm in which we expect to predict and control most of the things that happen to us:  if I flick this switch, I will get electric light; if I take this pill, my blood cholesterol will be lowered; if I press these buttons, my food will be hot.  Storms unsettle all that certainty.  We can see them coming, even predict their routes, but other than that, there’s not much we can do about them save run away or ride them out.  We are dramatically, even violently, reminded that prediction and control take us only so far.  And it’s thrilling to see the power on the other side of it.

In fact, it’s more than thrilling:  it might just be a key to happiness.  In his wonderful and witty book Stumbling Upon Happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert says that our feelings about uncertainty are paradoxical:  “Uncertainty can preserve and prolong our happiness, thus we might expect people to cherish it.  In fact, the opposite is generally the case.  [In two separate studies], students chose certainty and clarity over mystery – despite the fact that in both cases clarity and certainty had been shown to diminish happiness.”  In this case, Gilbert is referring specifically to our craving for explanations.  However, I think it’s reasonable to speculate that we also crave a degree of uncertainty in the flow of daily life, some variation or possibility of the extraordinary that lies utterly beyond our control.  This quality of uncertainty is usually painfully dulled by the reality of, as Albert Borgmann puts it, the character of technology in contemporary life, but storms briefly and beautifully illuminate it.

At the same time, storms also make us feel a part of nature, wherever we are, and whether we want to or not.  They are city/country agnostic, roaring in with the elements with equal ferocity whether we’re in Georgian Bay or downtown Toronto, or as we’ve seen this week, even Manhattan.  At the same time, they’re absolutely specific to the place and season:  a monsoonal storm in Bangkok is a distinct event that grounds you there, in that season, just as a blizzard is a core part of the Canadian winter experience.  We might do our best to create cities and interiors that replicate sameness, but the weather grounds us – sometimes forcefully - in season, time and place.

To Do: Live!

Ever thought of making a to do list just for the fun experiences you would like to have?  This is the subject of Milena Bierhoff's great blog today.  In it, she discusses the way in which fun helps to make life "interesting and memorable", so that each day counts, and isn't lost in a blur of sameness.  It’s a great read, a chance to learn about wife-carrying championships, and inspiration from others who are trying to switch-on.

Just Add Water

This is not the average place from which to consider feeling uplifted and engaged:  I’m back in Georgian Bay.  It’s so damned beautiful.  Windblown, hardscrabble trees; changeable blue water; that magnificent smooth rock of the Canadian Shield, worn down from millions of years of glaciers and storms.  Samuel Johnson said that if you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life, but I think those words are even better said about Georgian Bay. Besides the beauty though, the thing that really moves me is being in, on, and close to the water.  The signature picture of this blog says it all:  as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t get much better than diving off a dock.

Although, then again, maybe kayaking comes close.  Today I took a fiberglass kayak out for a paddle around some of the little rocks and islands that surround the cottage.  I hadn’t been in a kayak since I was fifteen, so I started by clinging to the shoreline, but as I got used to the boat - its feminine roll under my hips, the way the water dripped back in if I raised the paddle too high, the slap of the water against the hull - my confidence came back.  Soon I was scooting out across the small expanses of water between the little islets, watching the depth carefully so I didn’t accidentally run aground.

It felt incredible.  Here’s what I saw:  a dozy cormorant, as surprised by me as I was by it, took off from the water right beside me; a monarch butterfly kept me company at my furthest point from land; a mysterious, glinting shape in the water turned out to be a leaf – one’s of fall’s first casualties.  And beneath me and the sparkling water, I watched the submerged round rocks of the bay, now deep and dark, now just inches from my paddle.

This was more than fun – this was joy.  Which made me wonder:  is water almost universally engaging?  Think of the ways we express our love of water!  Houses with ocean or lake views always sell at a premium (“buy waterfront,” my mother used to say, “they’re not making any more of it”).  We love holidaying by water, be it on beaches or cruises.  We love to play in and on water:  we swim, Sea-Doo, water ski, snorkel, scuba dive, play water polo, fish, do synchronized swimming, surf, wake board, use myriad kinds of boats and generally frolic.  And we even bring water into our dwelling spaces…we love fountains, swimming pools, ponds and fish tanks.  We even buy CDs that play the sounds of the surf.

Being by and in water seems to soothe and uplift us, to make us feel alive.  Perhaps it’s because water itself often seems alive, moving and flowing like a life force.  Perhaps it’s because we carry a palpable sense of the hidden life in water, the fish, squid, clams, corals, sharks, whales, and strange deep water things that glide about, unseen by us but nonetheless teeming and vibrant.  Perhaps it’s because it’s really that water keeps us close to nature.  Or perhaps it’s a question of scale…that being by water is like contemplating the night sky, in that it reminds us that we’re really quite small in the scheme of things, a thought that is actually rather comforting?

And, of course, many of us have personal memories and attachments to water that are rekindled when we are near it.  Perhaps water holds them so well because, like land, it is an elemental force and has a capacity for multiple meanings.  In my case, it starts with the sense that I am from a family that is almost mystically connected to water.  My great-grandparents met at sea;  my great-grandfather was a ship’s pilot in Singapore; my mother was a long-distance swimmer, my grandmother always lived in homes that looked over water, as indeed did I until I was ten and we finally moved to the city.  Now when I’m by water, I feel like I’m somehow being true to a deeply embedded sense of identity, and that feels good, even uplifting.  It is one of the paradoxical properties of fun that we can experience it both by rule-breaking and setting ourselves free, and by feeling that we are being fully consistent with our deepest sense of self.

But beyond this familial connection, I’ve spent many days on water that produced the experiences and memories that tell me who I am.  There were the days that my brother and I used traps lined with bacon to catch Dungeness crab off the pier at Crescent Beach;  afternoons diving off the dock at the cottage with my cousins when I was eleven; moonlight walks on the beach with sweethearts in my teens and twenties; watching sunrise on the beach in Thailand one Christmas Day; bobbing like a cork in the Dead Sea; sitting in a rock pool with friends, eating oranges and letting the juice run all over us because we were already in water; swimming in the Sooke potholes the day of my friend Sarah’s wedding; floating my daughter in the water with her safe in my arms…the list goes on, and now I have today’s kayak to add to it.

I think there are two things that I will take away from today’s adventure.  The first is that water itself is a powerful source of fun, joy and life and finding ways to connect to it can be a great way to switch-on.  The second is that is that we are a sum of memories, and as much as these are memories of engagement and fun, then so we will feel buoyed and rich with the strength to make more.

Upgrade the Fun in Your Life: Have a Family Dinner

I am delighted to say that you can find today’s post, Upgrade the Fun in Your Life:  Have a Family Dinner at thefamilydinnerbook.com.  This is the official site for the beautiful and engaging cookbook The Family Dinner, by Laurie David and Kirstin Uhrenholdt.  Many of you will know Laurie David as the producer of the stunning Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.  Laurie’s new cookbook The Family Dinner, is no less a work of activism, but this time one that talks about the ways in which fun, connection and healthy and sustainable food at the family table create strong families and communities.  I hope you’ll visit the site, which is full of great ideas for enriching family dinners, quick and delicious meal ideas, and important information about the food we eat!

Light Up Your Life

The shooting arc of light, the deep pop as if from a giant champagne cork – I hold my little son and join the collective gasps of our friends and family as the fireworks trace patterns through the sky.  My cousin and his friend are down at the beach and they take turns lighting the fireworks with a torch.  It’s dark, so we can’t see who is who, but we can see the torch moving around the beach.  The rest of us are up on the cottage deck, watching from a safe distance, safe from the mosquitoes that is, which swarm the path between cottage and beach.  The grown-ups have wine and meltingly delicious cheeses (I’m hooked on a triple-cream brie, and am hoping no one is noticing how much I’m eating).  The children have popcorn, cookies and more cookies.  The surprise hit this year is one made with cornflakes and cashews, which mysteriously is crunchy and chewy at the same time.  The children are over-excited, and they go from talking at top volume (“LOOK AT THAT ONE!!!  THAT’S MY FAVORITE!!!), to reverential silence and gasps.  It’s 9:30, so they’re up past their bedtime, which is just awesomely excellent for all of them, and there is an unlimited supply of treats.  Paradise. And, let’s admit it, the grown-ups are in pretty fine fettle too.  There’s that cheese.  But perhaps more to the point, we’re delighted to be together, and the fireworks are fun.  They can’t help lifting our spirits up with them as they vault into the air.

We have a habit of thinking that fun has to be spontaneous, but this fireworks party is a great example of planned, even carefully engineered, fun.  My aunt and uncle host this party every year at their cottage.  One of my cousins buys the fireworks early in the summer:  it’s been his job for years and he does it well. He knows how to build from the first pretty pops to the fabulous, colourful crescendo at the end.  From the start of the summer, my aunt and uncle watch for the right time for the party.  It’s got to be at a time when the weather is just right, that is, where it’s been wet enough there’s no fire hazard, but not so wet that it’s a misery to be outside.    When they figure the time is right, they let their closest neighbours at the cottage know the date and time.  A couple of days before, my aunt plans the food and bakes the cookies.  On the afternoon of the party, my cousins go to the beach and carefully plant every firework.

That’s a lot of orchestration.

Then the night arrives, and it all flows in a current of excitement.  Tonight, we ate a yummy dinner of homemade Pad Thai early, so we’d have lots of time to clean up and get ready for the guests.  As soon as the dinner things were cleared off the table, we set it again with the wine, cheese and cookies, which we then all proceeded to steal whenever we thought no one was looking.  When darkness started to fall, the children set up watch for the neighbor’s boats, straining to hear motor or see lights:  it’s tradition to arrive by water, as if the party’s being held in some wilderness-Venice(?).  When we heard the first motor, the kids literally started hopping up and down with excitement.  “People coming!” they sang, “Fireworks!”  And a night of – literally spectacular fun – follows.

Of course fireworks themselves are fun and exciting.  They’re rare and special, they’re beautiful, and we usually watch them in happy collectives of friends and family.  If you haven’t got out to watch some fireworks this summer, look for a chance.  Brave the crowds, let the kids stay up late.

But the message that I’m taking away from this isn’t just about fireworks, it’s that we shouldn’t be afraid to plan fun.  Spontaneous fun is lovely, but we ought not to let ourselves be held for ransom by the idea that we’re supposed just supposed to make it happen.  For one thing, that puts a lot of pressure on us, and who needs that?!  But more to the point, to feel that fun ought to be spontaneous is to overlook that, throughout history, all peoples have always created occasions, big and small, to celebrate and have fun.  It’s just as much a part of being human as eating, breathing and working for a living.

Shine On

“…Joy makes you more intensely you.”  Isn’t that a provocative – even beautiful - thought? It’s a line that I have not been able to get out of my head since reading it in All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly.  To be fair to the authors, I am taking it out of context.  In the original passage, the authors are actually contrasting two different modes of spiritual engagement, bliss, which leads to disengagement from the world, and embodied joy, which leads to reengagement with it.  Their premise is that a fulfilled life stems from engagement with the world, which enables us to find joy and wonder in shining things, that is, things and practices that are meaningful to us.

I’ve been meaning to write about ATS for some time as it’s a remarkable book, one that could have been custom-made for this whole enterprise of switching-on.  Indeed, I first heard about it when a very well-read friend of mine, in response to my description of this research, said, “Hmm, I think you ought to read a book called All Things Shining.”  The problem has been that the book is so rich, and there is so much one could say about it, that it’s been hard to know where to start.  However, even as I was mulling this over, I read that ATS was getting released in paperback today, so it seemed that I just needed to get over it and say that if the topics I’ve been writing about here speak to you at all, then you should go out and buy it.

To me, ATS is a beautiful book because it rejects the sort of nihilistic arguments that say either that there is no meaning in the world at all, or that any meaning we can generate has to get there through an imposition of our own mind and will.  They basically say straight up that that’s simply too hard….  We are but mortal, how can we possibly hope to rise above every situation and find in it a level of meaning that makes our life worthwhile?

Dreyfus and Kelly suggest instead that the world is already replete with meaning and that the human task is to pay close attention to the nature and substance of things, and to invest in cultivating deep insight into the things that matter to us, in order to find it.  They provide some examples of this, but they also call upon readers to experiment, to see how and where they are deeply attracted to developing skilled and differentiated knowledge, because what “shines” may vary from one person to the next.  “If we are to be humans beings at all, we must distinguish ourselves from others;  there must be moments where we rise up out of the generic and banal and into the particular and skilfully engaged.”  One way of conceptualizing this is Homer’s polytheism, in which certain gods might speak to or “call” given mortals who are especially attuned to them, but however one thinks of it, one of the beautiful sensibilities here is that one finds insight, meaning and self-knowledge through engagement, not through a sort of endless exploration of the self.  This has a powerful appeal for me, and seems to be at the core of the switching-on project.

But you should just read the book.  Because Dreyfus and Kelly tell their story by guiding the reader through some of the great Western classics, you get fresh insight into the works themselves as well as coming to understand how our current sensibilities evolved.  It’s so easy to take our assumptions for granted;  understanding where they came from helps us understand the different options lives that are really available to us, options that can help us live shining lives.

The Revolution is Here! Load Your Water Pistol!

Fun is a force to be reckoned with.  In Tehran this week, 14,000 people of all ages loaded their water pistols and gathered in a public park for a water fight in response to an invitation on Facebook.  Pictures of the event shown in The Guardian and on the site of blogger Potking Azarmehr show people having an absolute blast:  a joyous young woman sending an arc of water into the air, a delighted father whose arms overflowed with his little girl and a giant water gun, and a grinning woman emptying a water bottle on her friend. But, as has been reported around the world, this unbridled joy promptly incurred the wrath of Iranian authorities, who, according to Saeed Kamali Dehghan in The Guardian, referred to the event as “abnormal”, “shameful” and “against social norms”.  They wasted no time arresting some of the participants, forcing them to appear on state television, their backs to the camera, to atone for their “crime”.

Officially, the problem seemed to center on the fact that the water fight was a mixed-gender event.  Girls!  Boys!  Water!  Iran, of course, has very strict rules prescribing the separation of the sexes so a bunch of boys and girls frolicking in the park would definitely be provoking to authorities.

Unofficially though, the problem might not have been the mixing of the sexes itself so much as it was the fun they had.  In his post on the water fight, Potking Azarmehr writes that in Iran, “you risk incarceration if you dare to have fun, particularly if it’s group fun and if it is in public”, and in Dehghan’s article Azarmehr is also quoted as saying, “There are two issues here which have troubled the regime:  people having fun and people organizing a gathering through the social media.  Both are perceived as a threat by the regime.”  Indeed, in his post Azarmehr furiously notes that the authorities investigate real crimes such as knifings and rape only lethargically, whereas they’re very vigorous indeed about cracking down on fun.

While no expert on Iranian politics, I think there are a number of reasons why the authorities there might perceive fun as dangerous.  First, fun is an irrepressible feeling of being alive.  To feel alive is to feel engaged and energized, and while mercifully I’ve never lived in an authoritarian state, from all accounts such regimes try to coerce their citizens into being dulled, afraid and withdrawn.  There may be room for some version of “fun” if it is organized under the aegis of the authoritarian regime itself and meant to support it - I’m thinking here in particular of the Nazi program “strength through joy” – but I think it’s fair to question if this kind of fun leads to the same unbridled levity as the Iranian water fight.

The other reason fun is potentially dangerous to authoritarian regimes is because there’s a whole lot of fun to be had breaking rules, and the “authoritarian” in “authoritarian regime” pretty much gives it away that these guys are big on rules.  Of course, fun can be a subtle means of teaching us the “rules” in the first place (many of us first learn about capitalism playing Monopoly, after all), but I think it’s possible that one of the key social purposes of fun is to lead us to push at boundaries, experiment, break rules, play with the possible.  This aspect of fun is a wildly creative force, both personally and socially, and it’s this generative spirit that’s actually the problem for the regime, not just the rule-breaking in and of itself.  In the water pistol example, the participants’ fun is a shining example of another way of life, and they are potentially energized to do something about it.

And finally, authoritarian regimes might also fear fun because it is a powerful mechanism by which to connect to something, which is perhaps why, if Azarmehr is correct, the Iranian authorities were also particularly perturbed by the organizers using social media to invite the public to the water fight.  In this case, the water fight connected 14,000 people who shared a joyous few hours using water to beat the brutal summer heat.  Those are 14,000 people who now have a shared memory of the event and who know what it meant to them-  notwithstanding the officials’ desperate-sounding attempts to define it as something shameful and awful.  This connection might dissipate as fast as it was created, but it also might be the seed of a new vision of a defiant collectivity, or if that is too outlandish an interpretation, we can perhaps see it at least as part of a mosaic of events that are bringing Iranians together is novel and unsanctioned ways that brim with possibility.

We had a water fight of our own a few weeks ago, on a scorching mid-July Sunday.  It started innocently enough.  Our neighbour was playing a game with his son, in which they took turns using attacking each other with a hose, and using a shield in defense.  Our daughter, lured over to their garden by the siren sound of their laughter, soon joined in.  Then, somehow, water started flying across the fence that separates our two yards and pretty soon it was a fully-fledged adults vs. children hose and water gun fight.  It was mayhem, water coming from all directions, children in bathing suits underfoot, ambushes, full-on assaults, you name it.  We literally screamed with laughter.  We all had dinner together later, still on a high from our half-hour of play, buoyed and connected.  We’ll probably remember it as a highlight of our summer.  And, a few days later, little Jamie, who’s two and was a bit taken aback by it all at the time, hauled out a hose all by himself in order to try to replicate what happened.

So although one who is lucky enough to live in Canada probably can’t fully appreciate the public water fight in Tehran, I can imagine the feelings of joy, connection and sheer aliveness the participants must have felt and, when I think of Jamie getting out the hose again days later, I can imagine the contagious power their fun must have generated.  Contagious power that has the authorities watching in fear.

Fun for Boys and Girls

Once when I was fifteen, my very British grandmother and I sipped tea in her colourful West Coast garden while she regaled me with stories about her life in Singapore in the 1930s.  With a gleam in her bright blue eyes, she confessed the feminine tricks she and the most sophisticated of her friends used to use to captivate men.  Before dances, they’d pin rose buds to their underskirts, so that when they danced, men would go crazy trying to work out what was causing the occasional flash of colour by the girls’ legs.  And they never showed too much skin, not because it wasn’t proper, but because they knew translucent fabric was so much more tantalizing.  Then there was doing the unexpected, like showing up at a picnic in wide-legged Katherine Hepburn trousers and a big hat, instead of the ubiquitous floral frock.

In these stories, it was pretty clear that my grandmother was no victim of gender roles, forced to play the coquette because it was the only access to power she had.  Not a bit of it.  She pinned roses to her slip because it was fun:  fun for her, fun for the men, fun all round.  This is not to say that gender roles in the 1930s wouldn’t have been constraining:  of course they were.  But they were also sources of experimentation, play and celebration.

My grandmother’s stories have been on my mind recently given the number of articles about new initiatives to encourage children to develop free of gender stereotypes.  For example, there is the Swedish preschool that’s purportedly trying to cultivate a completely gender-free environment by banning all fairy tales and doing away with masculine and feminine pronouns, among other efforts.  And of course there is Toronto-based baby Storm, whose parents are concealing his/her sex until the child is old enough to decide on his/her own gender identification.  Some people are for these sorts of radical efforts to de-emphasize (or perhaps even attempt to abolish) gender, and some people say that they go too far, but it seems that whoever weighs into this debate shares a similar belief that we ought to take gender very, very seriously and that it is fundamentally a problem that we need to fix.

I find this kind of irritating.

OK, I’m enough of a dyed-in-the-wool feminist to agree that gender is an important topic, and that it’s quite right that we ask ourselves how to raise children who are free to be who they want to be.  And I’m not going to claim that my grandmother’s generation had it right and we ought to turn back the clock.

But at the same time, I can’t help thinking that the whole topic of gender bubbles with the potential for fun.  Take the bedrock level of the dance between the sexes: as my grandmother illustrated so vividly, it’s fun to play around with masculine and feminine allure.  Flowers pinned to slips!  Many (if not most) women who have been to say, Paris, Rome or Bogota will speak wistfully about the switched-on feeling one gets from the flirting that’s just a normal part of life there.  And of course, there’s male equivalents:  the man perfecting his approach to women (a subject of umpteen comedies), or polishing his wit, or cultivating a bad boy appeal.

All of which raises the point that, at an individual level, it’s also fun to experiment with gender repertoires.  Yes, there’s a world of experimentation beyond gender categories too, but in addition to asking, “what kind of person do I want to be,” it’s fun to ask, “what kind of man or woman do I want to be”.  And of course it’s not static…that’s the beautiful thing about identity.  We’re our own narratives, and can continue playing throughout our lives.

It’s also fun to celebrate inhabiting a certain gender.  Peggy Lee and her wonderful song I Enjoy Being a Girl come to mind here, with her happy verses about of dresses made of lace, receiving flowers and talking on the phone for hours, “with a pound and a half of cream upon my face”.  We seem far more inclined to fret about gender now than to celebrate it, perhaps because we’ve become terrified of stereotyping, or because we’ve come to define gender by only constraint instead of possibility.

And finally, it’s fun to experiment with transgressing gender too, but one can only transgress if some boundary exists in the first place.  The dazzling academic Marjorie Garber has pointed out that drag is a theatrical exploration of the ideas of essence (sex) and construction (gender), but drag is also fundamentally fun because it transgresses gender rules about who wears, does and says what.  Individual artists, such as icons Marlene Dietrich to David Bowie, have clearly had a lot of fun (and created damn sexy personas) doing the same.  But these are just the visible examples.  In their song Laid, the band James describes the intense sexual play of a couple, “Dressed me up in women’s clothes, Messed around with gender roles, Dye my eyes and call me pretty.”  In other words, the lovers are having a whole lot of fun pushing the limits on everything, including their own gender roles.  If it seems a little perverse to say that we should have rules just to break them, well, maybe it is.  But it’s also a means of keeping a genuinely creative force going in culture, one that opens up whole realms of fun.

This is not a post to argue we should create rigid gender categories and then police them…not at all.  What I am saying though, is that fun is built into the existence of male and female, and to try to excise gender from our world would be to cut ourselves off from something that is a source of fun in addition to whatever else it may be.  A gendered existence doesn’t have to mean simply slavishly acting out preordained sex roles, it can also mean playing with identity in an engaged, irreverent and even sexy way.

Which brings me back to the Swedish preschool.  Hats off to the people who are trying to create a brave new world for all those little girls and boys.  But just suppose instead of trying to suppress the idea of gender, they played with it instead?  Play and fun are wildly creative, and through it, we just might find a way to have our pink frosted cupcakes and eat them too.

In the Water, off the Dock: Perfecting Something You Can’t Get Better At

My son Jamie and I were exploring, and we made our way down to a seldom used dock by the cottage.  We pushed aside the spider webs that floated above it (the spider webs there are so ubiquitous there they seem to attach themselves to the very air), and enjoyed the first bounce of buoyancy as our weight hit the wood.  Jamie, captivated by the sensation, jumped and rocked from side to side, testing just how far he could tilt the dock and send the water whooshing out from underneath us.  Of course I joined him.  It’s been a few years, to say the least, since I played on a dock, but it’s pretty irresistible once you start. Eventually we tired of this and walked down to the end of the dock to peer over the edge.  Jamie proceeded to plunk himself down, take off his shoes, and drop his feet into the water.  Now, this is a two year old who can’t swim, so I dove for him, fearing that he was about to jump into the water.  But not a bit of it:  he just wanted to put his feet in the water.  Once I calmed down, I realized Jamie was on to a good thing.  Still holding on to him (safety first!), I took my own shoes off, sat down beside him, and put my feet into the cold water.

The water was so clear that we could clearly see the gently rounded, algae covered rocks underneath us.  There was also some sort of mysterious mesh thing, perhaps a long abandoned trap of some kind.  And, once the water settled down after all our activity on the dock, a timid school of minnows ventured to swim right by our feet.

I thought there was something enchanting about the fact that Jamie instinctively seemed to “get” the pleasure of dangling one’s feet off a dock.  Of course, it’s possible that he was just copying something he’d someone else do, but even if that were the case, he certainly didn’t hesitate.  He knows fun when he sees it.

As we sat there, watching the minnows and dragonflies (and keeping an eye out for the vicious horseflies that were around, in case you think this is getting too bucolic), it occurred to me that this was an experience of fun that we don’t need to work at.  You can’t get better at dangling your feet off the dock.  That is, I could perhaps have snorkelled down and figured out what the mesh thing was, and perhaps figured out exactly what kind of fish the minnows were, but I was never going to improve my feet-dangling skills.  Jamie, at two, already had just as much mastery over this experience as I – or anyone – was ever going to have.

This got me wondering how much room we make for this kind of fun in our lives.  It can seem these days that our approach to fun has been absorbed into a cultural paradigm that values mastery and competence so much that we unconsciously seek it in all dimensions of our lives.  If we enjoy something, we should strive be good at it!  We need to push ourselves, “take it to the next level”, test ourselves in a marathon rather than just run for fun, master French cooking, not just a soufflé.  And the few exceptions to this mostly seem tied to fun as consumption or entertainment, where the fun is being served up to us in the form of a trip to Disneyland, a movie, or some equivalent, where we can’t really get better at it, but then in some respects, we’re not really doing “it” in the first place.

The sociologist Micki McGee has said that we live in a self-help culture, one in which a fundamental insecurity is driving us to turn our lives into constant quests for self-improvement.  I think she’s right, and that this modality has colonized fun, so that it’s one more thing to be good at and the things that we find fun one more thing to master.

Let it be said that there’s every reason to believe that mastery and are profoundly important to human well-being.  Mental health experts say that they promote confidence and well-being and are crucial for building a healthy sense of self, one that is resistant to the doubts and self-loathing that are the bedfellows of depression.  Likewise, in his recent book Drive, author Daniel Pink says that mastery is one of the rare true motivators in life and suggests that companies that want to succeed should find a way to build opportunities for mastery into their work processes.  And, perhaps even more intriguingly, in their terrific book All Things Shining:  Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age, philosophers <a title="All Things Shining Blog" href="" target="_blank">Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly suggest that a sort of version of mastery, based on the Greek idea of poiesis, may be a way to call forth the sacred into the world.  In their vision, this mastery is the skilled knowledge and nurturing spirit to bring things out at their best, such as, for example, a master woodworker knowing just how to work with a given piece of wood.

These are all good arguments for why mastery matters.  And there’s no doubt that pursuing mastery in something can be a lot of fun, perhaps because pursuit itself is so fun.  But.  There are also beautiful opportunities for fun that lie outside the realm of anything that we can master.  They occupy the moments in our lives that are simply living, not expressing or striving.  There needs to be room for them too.

When Jamie put his feet into that cold, clear water, he was simply a child doing something lovely.  When I put my feet in the water, it was, perhaps, a de facto, if momentary, act of resistance.  I wasn’t working on my kayaking skills, or my tennis serve, or my martini mixing, or my writing, or my cooking, or anything else I do because it’s fun and I genuinely want to be better at it.  I wasn’t mastering anything, and I wasn’t improving myself.  In this one thing, Jamie and I were already perfect.

Lessons from Toady

I’m writing from Georgian Bay.  As I type these words, the sun, still radiant enough to have dazzled my eyes, is setting like an emperor retiring for the night.  A heron, in silhouette against it, heads for its nest.  It’s quiet, save for the soft lapping of lake water, and the occasional shrill call of a seagull making a meal over an ill-fated shadfly.  I’m tired and sunburned, and in honour of Gordon Lightfoot’s Christian Island, which is not too far from here, I will get myself a whisky of the Highlands shortly. It’s beautiful, and it’s fun.

Of course, we pretty much expect things to be fun here in Cottage Country.   This is Canada’s iconic outdoor playground.  It occupies a space in the Canadian imaginary that we all recognize, whether or not we’ve actually spent time here.  When it comes to unpacking fun, Georgian Bay deserves a lot of attention.  But today I want to focus on one small part of it:  Toady.

No surprises here:  Toady is a toad.  My children found him (her?) at the beach today and they were transported with delight.  They spent 45 minutes catching Toady, making sand beds for Toady, encouraging Toady to jump on to their hands, singing to Toady and trying to find things for Toady to eat.  They’d probably still be trying to play with Toady if I hadn’t eventually called time-out to give the wee creature a rest.  Other than a minimum of supervision to ensure they didn’t accidentally squish Toady in the course of their ministrations, the children were rapt and had no need for their parents.

After dinner, I asked my daughter about Toady.  She said, “Toady was fun!”  Now, this had been pretty much evident from their total focus on it, and from my two year old literally shaking with excitement and squealing every time the thing made a move, but given that I’m researching fun, it was interesting to hear her say it.  I asked her what was fun about it, and she gave me a withering look and said, “He hopped.”

And that is the lesson from Toady.  He hopped.  Of course, this is the sort of thing that children say and it’s perhaps yet another sign of my over analytical adult sensibilities that I read anything into it, but at the same time, it’s a sublime answer.  In “he hopped”, I hear that Toady didn’t need any added design dimensions, or educational underpinnings, or focus group discussions, to be just perfect.  Rather, Toady embodied fun.  The children found him in the course of an inherently fun activity, exploration.  And the unwitting fellow, perhaps to his chagrin, possessed many of the properties of fun things:  he moved (and unpredictably at that), finding him was a rare and special event for my children, he possessed a certain enchantment for them and there was a certain inversion of power in that they were so much bigger than he.  He was just inherently interesting, and we all tend to experience interesting things as fun.

All that said, I’m trying to think why my children were so much more excited by Toady than they are when they see animals at the zoo.  Don’t get me wrong, they love the zoo.  And zoo animals contain many of the same fun properties I was describing above:  seeing them is rare and special, they move in interesting ways, and so on.  Yet I’ve never seen my children transfixed before a zoo display, or so excited by a given animal’s behaviour, as they were by humble Toady (and this includes the time that a polar bear seemed to be trying to break down a glass wall in order to eat my son).  On the contrary:  they happily move from display to display, admiring the charm of the otter, grace of the snow leopard, or fierceness of the mountain gorilla, like people grazing at a buffet when they’re not really hungry.

So, I’m left wondering if Toady was particularly fun because the children encountered him in a context where the foreground and the background of the experience were united in a meaningful whole.  I mean that in the foreground was…Toady, with his most excellent hopping.  And in the background are numerous things that frame and bestow meaning to the foreground.  There’s the fact that my daughter has spent time in this precise spot every summer since she was born, that we are cultivating a knowledge of this landscape in the children and teaching them to understand that this is their place, that they know that their mother and aunts and uncles played in these waters (and perhaps with Toady’s ancestors!) as children, and that their family is here with them.  And, of course, they are outside with Toady.  They are seeing that the landscape is full of living things that also make claims to the beach, woods and water.

By contrast, the zoo offers a foreground of exciting and often rare animals in approximations of their habitats.  But there is nothing in the background that grounds and holds my children in a way that bestows further meaning on the event.  In fact, although many zoos today are refuges for animals and educational wonders, the reality is that the background they mask can actually be quite ugly: animal trade, loss of habitat, animal rescue and so on.  These are important things to learn about for they too are part of our world, but the lesson from Toady might be that we cannot expect to experience the same intensity of fun when the background and foreground are so divided.  Put them together though, and we have deep fun in all its richness.  We switch-on.

Fun Rules

I interviewed an elegant and articulate woman who told me that she’d once had amazing fun at a small town square dance.  I found her story fascinating, not because she enjoyed the dance, but because she herself seemed half mystified and half embarrassed that she’d enjoyed it.  Indeed, she herself had tried to analyze why it was fun, speculating that perhaps it was the sense of community in the town hall where it was held, and the exhilaration of the dancing.  Yet, when I asked if she’d ever attended another one, or even planned to, she said, “No.” Now this is a woman whom most would describe as upper middle class urbanite.  She’s sophisticated and comfortable in her own skin.  She also knows herself well and usually pursues fun in the form of extreme sports, intellectual pursuits and pretty highbrow theatre.  Why on earth wouldn’t she go square dancing again if she’d enjoyed it so much that it had left her switched-on and virtually high?

I think at least part of the answer lies in the concept of fun rules.

Every culture has a suite of values and norms that encourages its members to adopt particular ideas and behaviors, and conversely, inhibits them from others.  We like to think of ourselves as independent and self-directed, but our expectations, desires and behavior are shaped by many factors beyond our conscious recognition.  Psychology and sociobiology have etched themselves into the popular imagination as two means of uncovering hidden drivers of behavior.  We recognize that we might have unconscious motivations stemming from mysterious Darwinian drives or from formative childhood experiences.  But culture also shapes us – powerfully.  Our everyday and aspirational lifestyles, the rules and habits by which we engage with each other and the natural world, our sense of right and wrong, our orientations to risk, fear and pleasure and so on are all shaped by our culture, as expressed through its history, laws, technologies, institutions, possessions and media.  However, in a given society, all of these elements are so self-evident, so normal, that we tend to take them for granted as natural or inevitable.  It’s a case of most of us following most of the rules most of the time, without ever really stopping to ask ourselves what those rules are, how they’ve come to be, and whether they’re actually optimal for us.

When it comes to fun, culture shapes our views of it in ways that are not always fully visible to us, and that this has discernable impacts on our attitudes and behaviors.  We aspire to certain kinds of fun, see others as appropriate or inappropriate for our gender or social status, admire or abhor others’ ideas of fun, feel entitled to fun, or even feel that fun is a worthwhile pursuit, because of specific cultural inheritances and norms.  If we want to free ourselves up to have more fun, we need to understand how social conventions govern our access to fun, and how we can work with or against them to have more fun.

This can mean moving past what we feel we “should” find fun, and embracing what we do find fun.  It can also mean a whole lot of experimenting, and discovery through action versus our sense of self-knowledge.  We may find that there’s more to us, and more ways available for us to switch-on, than our sense of self or our sense of what’s “right” will readily admit to.

In coming posts, I want to start exploring the fun rules that govern us, and would welcome any comments on the things you think you ought to find fun, but don’t, and the things you think you oughtn’t to find fun but do.

Steps in the Right Direction

My father-in-law accidentally sent my husband and me a pedometer.  It’s an unusual thing to receive by accident, but it`s been positively providential because I’ve been thinking a lot about the connection between movement and switching-on.  It’s fascinating, although quite logical, that in this technologically driven age of ours, we would have a device to help us keep track of that most elemental of human activities:  moving. The connection between moving and switching-on has been on my mind of late for a couple of reasons.  First, fairly early on in this research, I concluded that movement is a key characteristic of fun.  Whether people were describing fun to me, or I was doing ethnographic observations of fun, or just reflecting on fun in my own life, movement was everywhere.  Often, people described this in terms of their own movement, like dancing, hiking, rafting or simply walking, but we can also experience a lot of fun simply observing movement, whether it’s watching athletics, or the exploding light of fireworks, or even dogs chasing each other in the park.  This is not to say that all movement is fun, but rather that many things that are fun involve movement.

So if movement is a key part of fun, and therefore a way to switch-on, what are we to make of the fact that we live in perhaps the most sedentary society that has ever existed?  This aspect of our life has been starkly brought home to me in the last few days as I’ve been reading a fantastic essay by Herbert Collins, first published in 1954, called, appropriately enough, The Sedentary Society.*  I have to confess that I haven’t finished it yet, but what I’ve read has been enough to make me sit up (in my chair) and take notice.  Collins argues that “sitting is the symbolic posture of the age of science and technology” and that “a whole philosophy lies concealed in the act of sitting.”  Sitting is the posture of scientific inquiry, technology and rational organization, and “the man in demand is the sedentary, contemplative, but worldly fellow adept at figures [and] literate.”  Sitting reigns, and is associated with aspirational forms of work like banking or the professions.  This is now so entirely taken-for-granted that it’s useful that Collins reminds us that it wasn’t always like this.  Artisans, merchant-adventurers, field explorers…there were plenty of orientations to work – and fascinating, successful work at that – that didn’t have sitting at their core.  However, these occupations, Collins notes, seem quaint now.

And this was in 1954!  How much more sedentary have we become since then?!  Collins wrote those words before every family owned a TV, let alone gaming systems, DVDs and remote controls.  Before it was the norm to own a car.  Before schools paved over or sold off playgrounds and swimming pools.  Before personal computers.  Before Facebook and blogging.

We are used to measuring the impact of being sedentary in rather mechanistic terms:  because we don’t move enough, we are getting fatter; because we are getting fatter, we are less healthy, etc.  But perhaps we need to be looking at the impact of our sedentary life on our joy and fun as well?  And, following the argument of switching-on, to our very sense of feeling alive, and the happiness, flexibility, well-being and creativity that come with that feeling?

I recall reading Bruce Chatwin’s beautiful book The Songlines when I was in my twenties, and being moved by his passionate belief that as a species, humans are born to move.  Cribbing from the site Goodreads, I find the following Chatwin quotes, “My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other god.”  “Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one."  “Man's real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot."  Here was a man who believed in movement.

Which brings me back to my little pedometer.  I have been seated as I write this, but soon I will get up and walk.  The walk may or may not be fun, but perhaps it will help create the conditions for fun elsewhere in my day.  A few steps in the right direction.

* I have tried to find online references to this terrific essay, but have not yet had much luck.  I've been reading it in Mass Leisure (1958), edited by Eric Larrabee and Rolf Myerson, and there is reference to it first being published in The Scientific Monthly, Volume 79, Number 5, (November 1954), pp. 285-292.

Transform, have fun and switch on (or big hair and fun)

While a lot of people say that fun is totally subjective, I’ve been learning that if you compare diverse experiences fun, you start to see patterns.  So far, I’ve noticed two distinct patterns.  First, I’ve noticed a pattern in what kinds of activities people find fun.  For example, most people find exploring fun.  Second, I’ve noticed patterns in the characteristics of things we find fun.  For example, we tend to find things that are rare or unusual more fun than those we things we experience every day.  This is good news because, if these patterns hold true, they can point the way towards having more fun. Let me give you an example.

Now, I have to preface this example with a disclaimer:  it's about hair.  My hair.  And we all know that there’s a bit of a taboo in terms of professional women speaking publicly about something so apparently frivolous.  Thankfully, Grant McCracken has been a great forerunner here with his lovely book Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self, which, if not as personally revealing as the personal account which follows, at least sets a precedent of using hair to explore cultural phenomena.

So here it is:  I had a ton of fun getting my hair done the other day.  The background is this.  My hair, in its natural state, is blonde and curly, and in no ways conforms to the current sleek norm for working women.  But there it is:  I have the most classic “feminine” hair imaginable.  Its unruliness suggests ungovernable emotions and its blondness suggests ditziness.  It is the hair that launched a thousand jokes.

As those who know me are aware, I have tackled this issue in different ways over the years.  I have dyed it brown.  I have had it shorn to a pixie cut.  And, for the past four years, I have straightened it.  However, the other day, on the recommendation my friend, the teacher and mystery writer Francine Volker, I found myself in The Curl Ambassadors, a hair salon that specializes in helping women with curly hair.  Actually, “help” isn’t the right word.  These stylists celebrate curls.  The experience of being there was arguably straightforward:  for $20, a very nice young woman shampooed my hair, gave me advice on how to manage it, dried it and sent me on my way.  We’ve all done this a thousand times, right?  But somehow the whole experience wound up being terrific fun.

So, of course, I had to dissect it to figure out why.  What was different about this particular trip to a salon that made it so fun?

It quickly became clear that the experience was fun precisely because, for me anyway, it contained a number of the properties of fun experiences.  For example, I’d never been to the salon before, so it was a novel experience.  Moreover, the salon is self-consciously feminine, with a color palette of pink, white and silver and pretty, and pretty French-style furniture.  I don’t normally seek out such environments, and there was something really fun about it – like I had a guest pass to being a girly girl for an hour.  Letting someone encourage my hair back to its true nature was also a light or playful thing to do.  I was quite literally playing with an aspect of my appearance.  And there was a degree of uncertainty involved:  what would happen?  What would I look like?  Would I feel silly or strangely empowered to be back to my true self?

But there was also a sense of what this experience was really about, and that somehow added to the fun.  First, it felt highly social, if not quite Steel Magnolias, then at least something beyond the affected coolness of a typical hair salon.  There was camaraderie.  It also felt like a real escape from routine, and even from the strictures of the flat iron and the professional look.  And with that escape, there was a joyous sort of rule-breaking:  for at least an afternoon, no one was going to tell me what I should look like.  Finally, as Grant McCracken’s book argues, there was a sense of fun attached to the possibility of transformation.  I went in looking one way, and came out looking another – with all the marvelous possibility that suggests.

Now this is not to suggest that everyone would find a visit to the Curl Ambassadors fun.  However, I think it’s fair to say that fun exists where certain conditions exist.  Novelty, uncertainty, lightness:  these are characteristics of fun things.  And sociality, exploration, escape and rule-breaking, these are kinds of fun.  Identifying these empowers us to seek out certain experiences that are likely to be fun.

If you feel inclined, please feel free to join the discussion and add examples of fun that demonstrate or challenge this idea of the characteristics of fun.

Do you suffer from fun schizophrenia?

Fun is a great engine to help us switch-on. This should be cause for celebration, because fun is theoretically accessible to everyone, but there’s a hitch:  we are deeply culturally schizophrenic about fun.    On one hand, we regard it with suspicion, as if it’s a fast-moving train that’s going to take us straight to the towns of distraction, decadence and ruin.  This is because most of us over 40 were raised to believe that work and fun are opposite things, with work being the more virtuous.  Case in point: when I was in grade seven, my class had to chant “Long-term satisfaction is better than short-term gratification!” until we got it firmly planted into our little thirteen year old heads.  While this might have been a bit extreme, this ethos, derived from the Puritan work ethic, is built into the foundation of our culture, from various folktales involving better outcomes for squirrels that spend their days collecting nuts instead of playing, to arguments about the importance of restraint and self-discipline in everything from dieting to financial planning.  We might have varnished it over with a glossy layer celebrating leisure and conspicuous consumption, but it’s still there, orienting our thinking and behavior in all sorts of ways.

On the other hand, that varnish of leisure and consumption is really, really shiny.  It dazzles us with promises of pleasure and fulfillment.  In this world, fun is perhaps the most desirable goal, suggesting as it does, that one is beyond needing to worry about being a sensibly-minded squirrel.  Thus, we admire and envy people, like celebrities, who look like they’re having more fun than we are, we dish out small fortunes to buy fun experiences like trips to Disneyland, and we’re suckers for advertising that promises us “fun”, whether it be in our cars, cheese sticks or airlines.

That’s quite a tension to build into one little thing called fun.

And what is this thing anyway?  “Fun” is everywhere, but for all that, it’s strangely undefined.  We have fun dentists, fun workplaces, fun parks, fun cruises, fun buses and fun facts, but as of October 2010, Wikipedia didn’t have a distinct entry on fun - one simply got redirected to “recreation”.  While Wikipedia has since updated it, at the time of writing, their entry on fun is 99 words.  That’s pretty sparse!  (By contrast, Wikipedia’s entry on the Doppler Effect is 2790 words, and includes a handy animated illustration reminiscent of Sheldon’s Doppler Effect costume in the Big Bang Theory.)

Fun also just sounds kind of…inane.  Words like “happiness” and “joy” come trailing clouds of significance and even virtue.  Fun doesn’t.  Typically, when we think of fun, we think of pleasant amusements, entertainment, children’s games, and maybe a little mischief.  Most of us don’t associate it with health and happiness.

But what if we’ve got it all wrong?  What if this is a classic false dichotomy?

I think it is.  Fun isn’t just indulgence, it is the means to health and happiness, and also to creativity and flexibility.  Think about how you feel when you are having fun.  You might feel alert, engaged, uplifted and delighted.  You might be laughing, or smiling, or excited.  Or you might simply feel good, and happy to be alive and in the moment.

Happily, here in the early 21^st Century, there is a rising sense of fun’s importance, as exemplified by Daniel Pink’s claims that fun helps to develop creative, right-brained thinking, Jane McGonigal’s belief that fun can lead us to inspired problem-solving and Brian Sutton-Smith and Stuart Brown’s belief that play is adaptive.  Knowing this, we have an argument both to have more fun and to make a claim for it as necessary, both to our own well-being and even our culture.

So, at the start of this holiday weekend for North Americans - banish fun schizophrenia!  You don’t need to be the prudent squirrel, or the hedonistic reality-TV star.  You can be you, through joy.

Try This at Home: Two Quick Ways to Switch-on

I’m in New York City, feeling very switched on. I might not be the first to notice this feeling here.  New York is the city that doesn’t sleep, that spells names in lights, that has pleasures for every taste and that concentrates artists, intellectuals and various movers and shakers in startling density.  It’s got a bit of a reputation for switching people on (or for wearing them out entirely, but that’s a different story).

Right now, though, there are two specific things that are contributing to me feeling switched-on, and though I’m experiencing them here, they’re not NYC dependent.  Try this at home!

The first is just to wake-up to the sensory pleasure of wherever you are.  We have bodies as well as minds, but we tend to ignore them unless we’re exercising or in pain (or both).  I’ve been jolted into this sensory awareness because I’m in a different place, but you could just as easily take just a minute to wake up to what’s around you at home with a little self-conscious awareness.

For example, my hotel is on the Lower East Side, and as I stepped out into the street this afternoon I was hit by the smell of cabbage and pickles.  It was delicious.  The sun was bright and meltingly hot (for a Canadian anyway), and, as I walked down the famous streets, I was intensely aware of its warmth.  There were the ubiquitous traffic sounds:  heavy engines, car horns, sirens and even the odd squeal of tires.  The store fronts offered lush ranges of colors and designs.  I noticed the silk of women’s summer dresses, the range of skin colors, and the textures on the facades of the buildings.  This hyper-awareness was fun - it made me feel alive and in the moment.  I felt connected to my own body, busy taking in all these sights, sounds and smells, and through it, to the energy of the city.

The second idea stems from visiting one of my favourite spots in NYC:  the Tenement Museum <http://www.tenement.org>.  It’s an incredible place.  On Orchard Street in the Lower East Side, it’s a preserved tenement house that was home to around 7,000 immigrants between 1863 and the 1930s.  Katherine, our guide, said that one hundred million Americans can trace their roots to New York’s Lower East Side, and the Tenement Museum illustrates their experiences through tours that tell the stories of specific families that lived in its walls.  Each apartment was 325 square feet, but despite the privations  (especially in the nineteenth century), such as few outhouses for many families, no running water, no light, you can see how each family lived with dignity, and, yes, even sought to have fun by playing cards, making music, socializing while doing laundry – or perhaps visiting the saloon in the basement.

The Tenement Museum is remarkable for many reasons, but in particular it made me feel switched on today because it connected to the history of NYC.  I wasn’t just bouncing around on the surface of the city, in my own time, running my errands – I was part of a flow of people over decades and centuries.

Most of the places in which we work, live and play could tell us stories too.  What came before us?  Who else touched the walls that surround us?  Pursued dreams?  Celebrated birthdays?  This doesn’t even need to be the distant past – it could just be the people who worked in our office building before us.

So, try this:  try asking people in your office building if they know who was in the space your firm is in now?  Or try to find out the history of your house or flat.  For example, just last week, I heard a woman on the CBC who was enchanted to have learned that one of Toronto’s top historical photographers had once lived in her house – and sired numerous children in it!  She clearly thought the whole thing terrific fun.  It switched-on new depth and texture to her experience of her own familiar home.

10 Signs You Need to Switch-on

1. You watch Madmen and think that, for all their angst, those 60s guys and gals had a lot more fun than we do.
2. You check your Blackberry before you pee in the morning.
3. You have a lot of entertainment in your life, but not necessarily a lot of fun.
4. The seasons are really only relevant to you in terms of planning where to go on holiday.
5. You believe you would have more fun if you had more time or money.
6. Your most meaningful relationship is with your “to do” list.
7. You drink, eat or shop too much just because you have a hunger you can’t satisfy.
8. You feel like you're spending a lot of time looking after other people's fun, but you don't get enough yourself.
9. You're not quite sure what to do to have fun.
10. You have this funny feeling that you’re not living the life you were meant to have.

Gretchen Rubin pretty much hits the problem on the head in her book The Happiness Project.  One day, she had an epiphany:  “I wasn’t depressed and I wasn’t having a midlife crisis, but I was suffering from midlife malaise – a recurrent sense of discontent and almost a feeling of disbelief.... I had everything I could possibly want – yet I was failing to appreciate it.”

Three years before reading The Happiness Project, I had a similar, startling realization. It came during a game at a family reunion.  It was a simple exercise in which my uncle would stand on one side of his cottage and throw an egg clear across the roof to the other side, where the rest of us would vie to catch it.  You can picture it: 3 generations of over-excited family members, lots of enthusiastic screaming, raw egg everywhere. It was glorious, unrefined, ridiculous fun. And in the middle of it, I suddenly thought: Where has all the fun in daily life gone? Is it just me who feels this way? And is this just self-indulgence, or does fun matter?

Three years later, I have the answers to these questions.  First, I know that many others share feelings like Rubin's and mine.  Whether you think of it in terms of being happier or (as I do) simply feeling more alive, it’s clear that many of us feel switched-off when we actually want a richer life.

And there’s one thing we can be certain about: fun does matter. There’s a bill to be paid for feeling switched-off.  For example, not only do we feel lower, but our health can actually be affected because we lack the mental and physical resilience to be at our best. Our social ties are weaker because the glue that binds them – fun, positive experiences – is watered down. Our work and our parenting suffer because we have less to give. We’re less creative and flexible, and more focused on just managing.

All this is why we need to switch-on, but I think there’s one more thing, and maybe this is the most important point of all. We need to switch-on because, arguably, being switched-on is the point of life. Being alive, truly alive – isn't that what makes life lovely and worth living? If we’re not switched-on, why are we here? Don’t we want truly to live?

In my next post, I will start to share initial thoughts on what it takes to switch-on, but in the meantime, I would love to hear your perspective on this.  Are there any other signs of being switched-off you'd add to the list?

Vancouver riot: forget hockey, it was just for fun

Just yesterday, my little boy, Jamie, who’s two, sank his teeth into my shoulder so deeply that he broke the skin.  He didn’t do it because he was angry or mean.  He did it because he got completely overwhelmed with emotion, and in that moment, all he wanted was to be connected with me. He might have a two year old’s way of showing it, but we all crave connection.  We might want to be connected to each other, or to nature, or to a group or even to a belief, but we love and need to be closely attached to things.  Indeed, moments of true connection can be really fun, and carry us to a switched-on high.

However, our craving for connection can also lead us into some pretty dark waters.  I’m thinking in particular of the riot in Vancouver last week following the Canucks’ Stanley Cup loss.  In the pages and pages of analysis that have been written since, most comments have centered on the idea that a particular element had to be responsible, such as professional anarchists, disenfranchised youths, disappointed fans, or a “bridge and tunnel” crowd looking for a thrill.  I haven’t seen anyone consider the notion that people participated because they thought it was fun.

But, you know what?  I bet it was.  I mean, scary as hell, and morally reprehensible, but fun nonetheless.  I would bet the people in the riot, or even at the periphery of it, felt truly switched-on.  Certainly you can see many of the rioters smiling, and looking really rather relaxed and happy, in some of the pictures from the riot.

As it happens, when Vancouver first progressed to the Stanley Cup finals, I actually thought about going out to Vancouver to interview people and get a feel for the atmosphere.  I’ve been wanting to look more deeply into a feeling known as “collective effervescence”.   Collective effervescence is pretty much just what it sounds like:  it’s the feeling we experience when we share a group’s collective excitement, anticipation or joy about something, especially something that’s meaningful to us.

I’ve been suspecting that collective effervescence is an important kind of fun, although it’s one that our modern society features only rarely.  Where once collective effervescence would have been a normal part of a life marked by commonly shared religious beliefs, or important shared experiences (such as harvest), now it’s pretty much relegated to the sidelines, existing in smaller pockets like major sporting events.  Thus, I thought that the Stanley Cup playoffs would be a great way to explore what people were feeling and the impact that it was having on them.

In the end though, my daughter’s end-of-term activities kept me at home, so I wound up watching the playoffs – and their aftermath – on TV.  Like everyone else, the morning after the riot, I asked myself, “Why?”  I mean, it’s awful when your own team loses (and to Boston!), but seriously, tearing up your own city hardly seems like a reasonable response.

Because I’d already been thinking about collective effervescence though, I started to wonder if the craving for that bigger sense of connection, albeit expressed in a very dark way, was really at the heart of what happened.  For sure it sounds like there were some people who might just have been agitators, but there were a whole lot more who were willing to be agitated.   In other words, people were willing to be swept up, to suspend their sense of right and wrong, in order to feel connected to a mass of energy and excitement.  And frankly, as people, this needing to feel that connection just might be a core part of our humanity.

Which leaves me wondering how we can foster collective effervescence in ways that are healthy and positive, that attach all that energy – and through it, us – to something with meaning, so that we’re using it to build up rather than tear down.  The intent isn’t to foil another Stanley Cup riot, not sure if one could, but to recognize that that riot tells us something about what we ourselves might need.

Maybe we need to bring back harvest festivals.  It wouldn't necessarily stop the looters, but it might just do something wonderful for the rest of us.