What if we just, like, lived a little, for godssake

where is the fun, I ask you

First, a vignette: I was sweating bullets on Monday at the thought of opening up my Word document and had to eat a Mars ice cream to just calm down and do it. This all happened because I hadn’t opened the document in a while and I had no idea where to begin, or how to continue. Awful.  

And I’ve been thinking about how adult life is so full of the idea of duty and, you know, big feelings of I should do this. You know those voices: I should workout three days a week! I should workout in a specific way! I should be, like, writing! In a specific way! To write a novel you must do it every single day at the same time and be disciplined and start a routine!  

It makes a drudgery of everything good. It makes a slavery of the Savage Garden (vampire chronicles reference there, sorry not sorry).  

And we’re all thinking: OK, well I have to do these things, though. Because that’s what being a fulfilled or even barely functioning adult human is. I mean, yes, you have a duty to do a lot of things, like chores in the house even, for example, your day job etc. You can’t just leave your child in a stinky nappy because changing nappies is boring and also hard when you’re trying to bend a squirmy human to your will. 

A man once asked a question: what if this were easy?  

These days, more than any other question, I’m asking “What would this look like if it were easy?” If I feel stressed, stretched thin, or overwhelmed, it’s usually because I’m overcomplicating something or failing to take the simple/easy path because I feel I should be trying “harder” (old habits die hard). — Tim Ferris

I’m going further: it’s more like ...what if this were fun?  

Because if I ask myself ‘what if this were easy’, I’d be like well, I’d just go play The Sims 4 then because an easy life is 100% what I want, thank you very much. 

What is the fun thing in this horrendously boring dutiful l thing that I have to do? Where is it? Where or how can you find it? What if you stopped being such a boring, dutiful adult in your outlook, and just looked for the fun in everything that you do? 

So, to that end, I was looking at my life and the things that I’m intimidated by. I recently bought a new camera. It’s a Canon AE-1 ,it’s completely manual, 35mm film, everything like that. I’m really intimidated by this piece of equipment.  

So I asked myself like...you know, what can I do to make this fun? How do you just let go and stop taking everything so freaking seriously? 

And hey, like maybe there’s things in your life, comrades, that you can think of that you’re intimidated by. What are you beating yourself up about, or thinking you’re failing at, or doubting you can even start? 

What if we all just got over ourselves and approached things like we were kids 

To that end, again, working on my fiction writing – another very intimidating thing. Every day you must swallow the frog, so to speak, even though it’s slimy and disgusting, and terrifying.  

You have a duty to swallow the frog, no matter whether you want to or not, because it’s the only way you’re going to make marks on a blank page that mean something.  

I’m working on three different things at the same time right now, as pretty usual, (as well as, like, a weaving and some other things). A novel & two short stories. I was getting stuck, too much gunk and terror in the gears. Nothing was working, everything’s jammed up. This is where me sweating and eating the Mars ice cream came in. 

So I’m just going to start telling stories using Rory’s Story Cubes. I was already surprised by what surfaced by the first one I came up with.

You know what's fun? Making up stories as you go along. You know what’s not fun? Freaking out about opening Word documents.  

I went and found how to make something scary be fun, because when it comes to creativity, you gotta keep yourself moving, and keep yourself off the ground.  

I find writing is so, so bound up by the baggage of received information (this is the only way to write! these are the routines of famous writers!) and expectations of yourself (what if X reads my book and thinks I’m a weirdo! what if nobody wants this!), everything like that. Writing is something, for me, that’s in a major need of being overhauled for the fun factor.  

So ...like, what can you overhaul in your life for the fun factor?

I’m not here to tell you how to write because who am I to do such things. But I’m here to tell you how to make things silly again.

How can you do that? How can you clear the obstacles away and just have fun and be in your body and alive and creating and burning, deeply, with the fire of experience?