Hello? Fun?

It comes to a close. The end of an achievement, the last paragraph of a pivotal chapter. The only one of its kind, the only one that will ever be.

I woke up the day of my 44th birthday with a once in a lifetime motivation. It had never occurred to me that I would still be alive at this point, and I made a promise to myself a long time ago that if I happened to survive this far, I would make the most of it. I would do everything I could think of, and I would do it without hesitation, if for no reason other than because I still had the opportunity. There’s no telling how long it had been since I felt, in my bones, the essence of the word “fun”. And since I happened to be able to open my eyes on this very special day, I committed on the spot to witnessing this vague picture somewhere within the next 365.

Fearlessly I went full force. I made new friends in faraway locales with which to trade important insights. I met some of them in person on my trip to Charlotte in May, where I also explored a whole new city and celebrated two new festivals and harvested many new perspectives. I followed up with a historic journey to the Forest in June, a life-affirming experience that gifted me pathways by which to heal ancient injuries. I threaded together my best music albums and in the process realized I had grown a new talent. I endured the brutal drought and the panic of its associated wildfires with a calm focus, commitment to community, and solid plans for the coming calamities. I started to feel gratification for a life perhaps truly lived, and at the peak of midsummer, I knighted my annual album “Celebration of Being”, to seal the peak with permanence.

But by the time autumn crept in I realized the actual essence of “fun” was still elusive. It was there, somehow, but in an indecipherable form, a shapeless mass. I had profound life experiences and witnessed a revolutionary personal growth spurt, and I was still surging forward, but what is “fun”? Where is “fun”? I had good times and learned things and felt new things, but why didn’t it feel like I was “having fun”?

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I bought my first-ever car and started exploring new places. I developed the best idea I’ve ever had for a new novel. I fell deeper in love with my work. I found I had a natural talent and passion for DJing, and I should have been developing a relationship with it all these years. I got a new guitar and started over with renewed, deliberate patience. I took a train trip north. In the Midwest I reunited with special friends and discovered joy both in the woods and in the city. I reached new distances and embraced new levels of confidence and wonder. My professional family rallied quietly around me at Christmas, and I used the momentum to try something new and support myself during the darkest, bleakest day on the calendar. And as the new year �" and the new YEAR �" appeared on the horizon, I doubled my efforts to think about how to make my home a home. Made plans to paint the walls purple, expand the flags and LEDs, reconfigure the speakers… And order a mattress I can actually fit upon.

But all the while, that same sought-after concept stayed an incomprehensible blur. I woke up the day of my 44th birthday and reached for a will to live, and I found it. Yet, “having fun” was little more than a series of incongruent shapes.

I boast value in the world, and I recognize it on multiple strata. I was moved to tears when a spiritual friend passed to me some of the most reassuring words I’ve ever heard, words that touched my soul and reinforced my greater purpose on this plane. I painfully but resolutely detached sources of toxicity from my life and reveled in cleaning up the damage. I made people’s lives better, both in large obvious ways and by subtle snippets they would never see. I made my OWN life better.

All the adventures I could want are at my fingertips; I can traipse through campgrounds and smile to myself in new bars and bookstores and coffee shops; I can see the hidden hurt in the hearts of cultists and preppers, and I can forgive them for projecting their own terror and doubt and self-disgust and distrust of their own gifts; I can lie on my back and count the clouds and the stars, or drive to the woods and sit with fields of bamboo allies and listen to their songs and let their whispers fill my body and mind and soul with purpose; I can write. I can listen. I can explore.

Possibility is everywhere. The options are unlimited, the world an open door. There are hills in the distance and grass beneath my feet and a breeze at my back, and while my body perseveres into the latter half of a lifetime, I find it an enjoyable challenge to refine my gear for the journey.

But where is-

Oh.

Ohh…

It is only when considering these gifts and my eyes cease staring at the past and instead open wide once more toward the future that the true essence of fun reveals itself. I draw a breath, detecting the ghostly figure emerge like a 3-D picture you have to look at cross-eyed to see.

Some people think of fun as something you do. If fun is a disregard of inhibitions and a grasping of sensory enjoyments, so be it. But what of the larger picture? What of the greater enjoyments? The ones that last, that linger, that you savor on your soul’s toungetip like the sweetest of strawberries? The ones you remember?

The possibility. Tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after it. The unknown beauty that winks seductively from up the hill, around the mountainside, and deep in the greenwood as rain washes away the past and a breath of wind nudges you gently but decisively forward. 

Behind me a year of adventure and discovery, growth and gambits sleep in satisfied peace. I regret nothing and I miss nothing. There is only what’s ahead, and a quickening heartbeat to suggest what might be there.

Now I see the picture, not just for what is evident on the surface but for how the true depth of beauty hides in plain sight. This phenomenon. It is a joy to live. To learn. To feel. To know. To NOT know.

It is profound and private fun to experience all that is. To be able to wish, and to wonder. To take a single step and feel all senses react to the experience. To leave behind established ways and carve out original ones. To NOT have all the answers, and NOT be right about everything, but to be challenged for your own benefit. To be humbled, even agonized at times, so that in the next encounter you will be something more than what you were before. To evolve, and therein feel the force of the universe in motion. As part of you.

This is the kind of fun you do not “have”.  It is not yours. It is a dream, a thought, a glimmer in the sky on a crisp clear night �" a quiet blinking beacon of hope and a fixture of all things beautiful, something to imagine, something to dedicate a creation to, or call upon, to know you’ll never set foot upon it yet to reach for it with all your might.

You can’t write a perfect story. But if you remember why it is that you are writing, the story you find will be a masterpiece.

One chapter closes with a triumphant salute. And I turn the page.

Bring it on.