Walt Hampton, J.D.

Creating the Work & Life You LOVE

Staying In Fashion
February 18, 2010

I fear that fun may be a lost art.

I attended a gathering of fellow professionals a couple of weeks ago.  A fancy, elegant black tie gala. During cocktails, I found myself conversing with a colleague that I hadn’t seen since the previous year’s event.  After engaging in the requisite flexing of professional muscle, I asked, “So what are you doing for fun?”

It was if I had asked him to recite the derivation of Pi.

He cocked his head and reached into the deep recesses of his mind.  “I just joined the board of directors of the local university,” he said. “I only had to pay three thousand dollars for the privilege.”

Perhaps we should go back to the professional muscle flexing, I thought.

About a month earlier, I had given one of my Denali slide shows and presentations to a business group. When I got to the end of the talk, I summed up with a kind of “call to arms:”  I encouraged the folks in the studio audience to seek out the adventure in their own lives, to find for themselves what is compelling and fun.

When I looked out at the group – dressed in their Brooks Brothers best – I wondered for a moment whether I had lapsed into Martian dialect of sorts.  It was as if there was no recognition of the word at all.

Fun?

Has fun fallen out of fashion?

I know that my idea of fun – living in stinky polypro for weeks at a time in sub-zero temperatures – isn’t the norm.  But I’m fairly certain that there are other ways to have fun too.

When I first started my professional career, the partner who had been assigned as my mentor said, “You get three weeks of vacation.  You can’t take them all at once. And of course, no one really takes them at all.”

That seemed odd to me.  I promptly planned three weeks away.

Early on in that job, I became friends with an associate who was two years my senior.  Jack had a great sense of humor and a twinkle in his eye.  But he had no time to play.  He had his eye on the prize:  partnership.  He assured me that once he grabbed that brass ring, he would have time for frolic and detour.

Jack became a partner.  But the successive years of eighty hour weeks dulled his gaze and flattened his affect.  He forgot how to have fun.

Fun isn’t optional.  It is essential to the fullness of our lives.

My old friend Anne constantly reminds me of the necessity of focusing on the “fun-factor.” Right about now, she’s on a small boat sailing to Antarctica.

A new friend, Pete, a student of Jack Canfield’s, shared with me a portion of his vision statement for living.  “Fun, freedom and fulfillment,” he said.  I like the way he thinks.

I know that not everything is fun.  There’s no question about that.  But I hear this refrain so often:  “Wow, the weekend was fun.  Now it’s back to reality.”

If “reality” contains no measure of fun, then something is out of balance.

Without fun, we are one-dimensional. Boring.

There seems to be a pervasive belief that work and play are antithetical.  Not so I think.

Fun enriches our work.  Our very best work – the work that most reflects our essential selves – the work in which we lose all sense of time – is fun.

My mentor Galen Rowell, in his beautiful collection entitled Mountain Light, spoke to this synergy in his own work of photography:  “I entered a world with no firm boundaries between working, playing and living,” he said. How rich a world that was.

How rich a world that is.

Steve Jobs says, “For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself:  If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

In his recent book Career Renegade, Jonathan Fields writes, “We are here to let our lights shine as brightly as possible, to drink in the joy of friendship and family, to serve and better the greater community, and to tap into and inspire passion in everything we do.  We are here to come alive. In doing so, we serve as an example to others that a life beyond muddling by is not only possible, but mandatory.”

We need to have fun.  And we need to have it now.  Too many folks put it off:  to when the kids are older, to when they’re out of college, to when they retire.  But the time never comes.  There are always more commitments. Events intervene. Health fails.  Life ends.

There is no time to waste.

If fun is falling out of fashion, I’m going back to bellbottoms.

1 Comment

  1. Caitriona strain

    another great piece Walt; I’m stealing a couple of lines out of it for my facebook page today – hope that ok

    Reply

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