Take Back Your Life!

“People rarely succeed unless they have fun with what they are doing.”
~ Dale Carnegie

I view every day as a chance to have fun. What is fun to me might not to be fun to you and vice versa. And that is okay. Only you can decide what passes fun muster for you.

So many are being encouraged to follow generic lives with generic experiences and generic responses to achieve generic accolades given out by folks usually living generic, un-fun lives themselves.

Does that sound at all like you? Never? Sometimes? All the time?

Some anonymous person awhile back said that life can’t be fun and you need to be serious most of the time to get anywhere in life.

Crap! Let’s debunk that myth right now. I believe it is the opposite. You need to have fun to create the life you want to lead! I had to do this for myself after trudging through my twenties – a decade with little fun except dancing at music clubs.

I had fun as a child and then lost it. Mainly because I had lost touch with what I enjoyed in life. Honestly, I’m not quite sure how it happened, but it did.

On weekends, I usually had no clue what to do and I had been someone who was really active in childhood. Horseback riding, hiking, drawing, questioning, collaging, singing. But the one thing I did enjoy after college was dancing at music clubs. It wasn’t until I saw Saturday Night Fever that I understood the importance of expanding how I felt when I danced to everything in life. I am grateful that I at least followed my love of dancing. Prancing around that dance floor made me feel alive and happy.

It took awhile on a rather circuitous route to reclaim my former embrace of all things fun, but I did get back to spending most of my life doing things I found enjoyable. Is everything fun? No, doing my taxes isn’t fun. Got to do it though or land in a debtor’s prison. Outside of those societal absolutely must do’s, I gravitate toward things that make me feel light and free, that make me laugh or feel like I did something important to my emotional well being. Work. Play. Everything in between.

If you would like more fun in your life, here are a few suggestions.

1. Take charge of your own life.
2. Make a list of what you like to do.
3. Do things on that list.
4. Make a list of things you don’t like to do.
5. Don’t do things on that list unless you absolutely have to.
6. Confront the mantra that you have to be serious most of the time. Or always at the beck and call of others.
7. Figure out if your current activities are real fun or fake fun. It’s possible to be conditioned to believe that you are having fun, when deep down you know you are not, but don’t want to “rock the boat.”
8. Rock the boat. It might seem scary at first. In time, it will be a blast.
9. Decide to say no to things that are not fun.
10. Decide to say yes to things that are fun or new things that could be fun.
11. Ask everyone in your family what they find fun and try to find ways for cross fun activities to happen. Children and adults are equally important for the health and well being of a family.
12. Put money away in your “have fun cookie jar.”
13. Make time for fun things first.
14. Forget what others think. They are not living your life.

I hope this list is of use to you in your quest to have more fun. The last thing I want to do is get to the end of my life and lie under a blanket of regrets. Nope, the time for me to enjoy my life is right now. Not down the road when I retire or after I finish this or that program. I vow to have fun as I go along.

Drop me a note and share what you find fun. I’d love to hear about it.

Yours in fun adventures, G.