I have a motto, “find the fun”. It wasn’t always that way though. For much of my life I was very serious, and honestly by serious much of that meant shut down emotionally. When I was in my late teen years someone at the Kingdom Hall died and my reaction was so cold that my best friend looked at me in astonishment and said that I had no heart. Nobody starts out life that way. Little kids just want to play and imagine things, to have fun, as they’ve not yet been told how they “should” act.
I would posit that for many of us, we never even had a healthy world of play and imagination in the first place. Play for us was answering Bible questions or building dioramas of the Ark or going out in service on Saturday mornings while other kids watched cartoons or played with friends . Imagination for us was looking at terror inducing images of death and destruction as the world ended in photos burned into our little brains. Imagining the fiery sky and the people falling into the cracks in the earth as it quaked with the anger of our “loving” god.
I wasn’t raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses from birth. I remember Saturday morning cartoons. I celebrated holidays and had friends and played up until the age of 8 or so when my parents joined a cult. I donned costumes and went door to door for an entirely different reason on Halloween. I remember the magic of Christmas and getting up to see the presents and the tree all lit up on Christmas morning. I remember Thanksgiving with family and how people were happy and bonding. Heck, I remember having a family before we abandoned them and isolated ourselves from them to join a cult.
The fun died for me. I became an old adult at a young age. Many never even had a chance to be a kid like I did. You were born into that mess and you were exposed from the very beginning. Little kids holding the weight of the world on their shoulders, afraid to make one wrong move because it could lead to you being slaughtered with everyone else at Armageddon. As…a…child. Everything we did and said even as children had universal implications with our own lives and those of others hanging in the balance. It’s hard to let your hair down and be free to be a kid when so much is at stake.
As adults many can have fun doing something big like going on a trip or buying some big adult toy (no, not THAT kind, though yeah, why not that too while you’re at it) like a new car or motorcycle or fishing boat or whatever. And those things are great for sure.
But never let yourself be so serious that you can’t be silly. That you can’t be spontaneous. That you can’t be a superhero by putting a smile on someone’s face. Oh, and on yours too. Life is too short to take everything deathly serious. The world around us wants us to lose that sense of play as well. To walk around taking offense at everything, to see everything as a matter of life and death, to lose a sense of whimsy and play. It isn’t healthy.
In Brene Brown’s book “The Power of Vulnerability” that I talk about often, the group of people that she studies that turn out to be the happiest is the group that plays the most. At the end of the day, the greatest currency in the world is happiness. It is why we do so much of what we do, trying to be happy. We eat food that makes us happy, have relationships that we hope make us happy, spend money on things to make us happy. But happiness is an inside game. We have to be aware of our place in it, and the place that a sense of play has in creating that from within instead of externally.
So what about you? How do you like to have fun in small but meaningful ways, things you can do any day of the week with those that you care about or by yourself? How do you have fun with the holidays? Do you look down on “childish things” like Paul in the scriptures, and like so many of the stifled, buttoned up Jehovah’s Witnesses that we knew, or that we ourselves once were? It is something to think about and to work on if we want to live a happy and free life post-cult.
During times like the holidays it is important to “find the fun” for ourselves because these things were Scrooged to death by the JW way of being, looking down on people that had found ways to enjoy the colder winter months and being with family. I, for one, don’t want to look down on the way that others find happiness and fun, I want to see how I too can find it there, and for many of us that involves introspection and letting go of the deathly serious nature of the environment we once lived in.