Fun Times

The other night I watched a TED Talk on the importance of having fun. Well, tried to watch it.

I gave up.

To be fair, a TED Talk seems a tough fun sell.

But increasingly I've noticed I'm not the right audience for anything fun. Am I aging out of life? Already? I'm only in my 60s. What's it going to be like when I'm in my 70s? 80s? 90s?

100s?

Thank heavens for the smorgasbord of free therapy via YouTube. Oh and crosswords. Not only are crosswords fun, they've taught me to watch out for confirmation and/or cognitive bias and/or whatever that bias is when we believe to the very core of our being an answer is correct, the only possibility, until <voila> the actual answer emerges and we're able to solve a whole section of the grid.

Just writing that gave me a little frisson, as the French say, although they probably don't say it of solving a crossword clue.

But I'm the age now my mother was five years into retirement when, like a lot of men, but also women, because women are men, too, gender being nothing more than a patriarchal construct, she was kind of at sea. I don't have anywhere near her level of income security but I doubt I'll seek gainful employment anymore anyway.

I love not working.

Trading time for money was never my thing, but I undersold myself, too, and that's my own damned fault.

I'm also the age Gram was when she came to live with us, a divorced woman who owned nothing, collecting just a small old age pension she used to pay for bus and plane trips to stay with other relatives every now and then.

If I'd been paying more attention I'd have realized sooner Gram was pretty zen, and a fine example of keeping it simple, stupid.

Anyway, as I said, for fun I've been watching a lot of YouTubes on such topics as Radical Acceptance and I came across this man, and really, the look of him was what drew me in, he was just, so... unlikely a purveyor of wisdom.

Think a silver haired Will Arnott, except a silver haired Will Arnott in real estate, not acting, and wearing a purple suit.

I'm long story shorting here, maybe even completely misinterpreting what he said, anguished, rending of garments, but he seemed to take Radical Acceptance, mesh it with "it's not your fault but it IS your responsibility" to arrive at "Radical Responsibility because it IS your fault".

Oh. My. Gord. So freeing. Suddenly, everybody else was off the hook, it was all on me, and a wave of calm descended on my world. All this time, like Dorothy in Oz looking to everybody else for help, my good witch showed up, a silver haired fox in a purple suit, to implore me to see the truth staring me in the face: It has always been up to me. I am the problem. Not everybody else. Me.

You've probably long been in on it so indulge me here while I celebrate freeing myself from trying to change others, magical thinking, bitter recriminations, and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc, and take responsibility for every big and little choice I made along the way that has brought me here to this truly, madly, and deeply rarefied existence I enjoy in our nation's capital.

And that's not all, because no sooner had I accepted responsibility for myself, than I decided to rewatch an old favourite, and maybe you know this guy who's been around for decades, Dr. Wayne Dyer, who told me - one more time - to let go of my personal history.

Now, for quite a while, I've known myself, as you reading this likely have known of me, too, to be hauling around an anchor to the past, my life story as I've made it up to be in a thousand and one retellings, pretending it was a necessary burden in order to be a writer, that giving it up would leave me at sea, and I wouldn't know who I was anymore.

Well, it turns out I was just using that narrative to avoid taking responsibility for the choices I've been making since I was a kid, and knew right from wrong.

I've got a very good memory, too. That's a good six decades of avoidance, I'm embarrassed to admit.

Anyway, it's all of a piece, isn't it, because in not taking responsibility for my own choices, including the choice to not set boundaries for myself, I was taking responsibility for the choices of others, blaming myself, blaming them, feeling guilty, used, abused, and suffering health consequences as a result.

Well, as much wiser people than me would say, today is the first day of the rest of my life.

Thanks for reading.