God, We Had Fun, Didn't We?
Can a life be measured by how much fun we had living it?
“God, we had fun, didn’t we?” was the last thing Siri Hustvedt told her husband, Paul Auster, on his deathbed.
She shared this in an interview about her recently published memoir. I heard it while showering and went to tell Cleo right after:
No matter what happens, I want to measure our life by that sentence. Think about us in our seventies, looking back at our lives, saying to each other what Siri said to Paul.
What was I thinking! What were you thinking, Siri! Life’s goal is way deeper than having fun. Life demands ambition, purpose, growth, goals, a social life, healthy limits… [insert a big long etcetera here].
But the truth is none of the above work without a bit of fun. Fun as the engine, the fuel, the juice. I shall laugh for the healthy, purposeful and immaculate ones that never show their teeth.
An angry man walks into a bar and says: how many things can a man do for free? A novel nobody asked for, a piece in two languages every Sunday on that goddamned Substack, plus waking up at 7, teaching, mentoring, consulting, having ideas, and parenting the 21st-century Montessori-y way?
It sounds like the intro to a joke, but that man knows no fun. Worse: he has outsourced it to his TV, that has the impossible task of making him laugh when he probably should be catching up on sleep.
Just as I press send on the email to my editor (first eighty pages attached), I remember her advice (in Spanish): si vas a meterte a escribir una novela con todo lo que tienes encima, que al menos sea para pasártelo bien.
I might have skipped that part. But you can’t undo sent emails, can you?
So having sent my pages, free of my burdens, I start my ‘Selfishly Recreational Month of May’. Below is a random list of things I did:
Visiting a natural science museum (feat. a giant T-Rex) with Theo.
Hosting my parents for the weekend and playing king of my hood as I showed them around.
Giving Theo a summer-ready haircut and sunglasses to match mine.
Trying hard to become a regular at the organic farm in West, secretly hoping they’ll start waving when I show up each Saturday.
Reading compulsively addictively non-stop.
Curating music playlists because music isn’t physical anymore and lining up old movies I thought I’d have seen by forty.
Going to the cinema to watch good-bad films (The Drama, Obsession).
In order to get fun to crack open, nothing helps more than getting lots of sun for weeks. In May everyone I know ate and laughed and watched 10p.m. sunsets. We all had friends and family visiting and showed them our version of the city like the locals we think we’ve become. We enjoyed day trips and long afternoons; some on little balconies, others on rooftops or sitting on benches by the canals. All of us refused to complain about the heat; some in case we jinxed it, most simply because our chronic case of PNES (Pale Northern European Skin) needed it so badly.
Ignoring fun looks like: Answering every message the second it lands, dropping whatever I’m doing, that neurotic mix of wanting to be liked and wanting people out of my way.
Fun making its comeback looks like: staging a small rebellion where I let a few emails sit for days and feel naughty about it. Giving my students, my clients, my mentees their VIP treatment while everything else takes a seat at the back.
One day you wake up and it’s almost June and you wonder if time runs or flies or propels forward, and at the same time you realise ideas are coming at you again like a battalion. So you start filling up that Notes app with new incoherent notes and you realise you want to write again.
You open your rusty Substack and wonder: what would writing for fun look like in here?
Dropping all those evil metrics, for starters.
Showing up when you feel like it.
Testing raw materials, exploring with your writing and your voice.
Writing without pressure, without goals.
Translating or not, most Sundays or some.
You re-read this paragraph and tell yourself: ok, that seems like fun, I’ll try.
Siri Hustvedt knew something my editor also knew, and that I am terribly good at ignoring: that life, like writing, might be worth all the trouble if one day you can look back and say God, we had fun, didn’t we?
Hace poco me hice un reminder visual: “Tengo un [blog, negocio, proyecto] para disfrutar, experimentar y aprender”… y este post me hizo recordar lo valioso y bonito que es crear cuando no estamos pensando, como dices, en las métricas. Fue bonito leerte lunes en la mañana ☀️☀️
Ps: totalmente de acuerdo!! No nos podemos quejar del calor 😅😂 luego le da por venir un “invierno” en medio
Fun as the engine feels like a perfect mantra for June.