CHAPTER 6
Stage Two: Discovering Your Fun
Are you a list maker? Some people are masters at creating lists — they live for it. I dabble, but I don’t delve. For instance, I occasionally play around with my list of top-five movie actors (Cumberbatch and DiCaprio are usually near the top). Or sometimes it’s my favorite Coca-Cola Freestyle concoctions (Vanilla Sprite + Fanta Lime = key lime — try it, you won’t be sorry). And, of course, there is my top-five song list for Jazzercise (“She’s a Maniac” beats “Vogue” by a nose).
Pretty much all of us are familiar with the idea of the play-list. Whether it’s Netflix or iTunes, we love filling up those lists with films and tunes that tickle our fancy. Building this list in advance makes it easy for us to sit down, relax, and enjoy at a moment’s notice. However, listening to music or watching Netflix all day often fails to leave us feeling fulfilled.
Others, to bridge that gap of fulfillment, have created a bucket list — the semimorbid idea of listing things you’ll do before you kick the bucket. Usually, these ideas range from the relatively mundane (visit Lichtenstein) to the downright dangerous (participate in the Running of the Bulls) to the just plain weird (go to a live taping of The Price Is Right dressed as Guy Fieri). However, the concept can sometimes leave people feeling that they’re falling short. Why? Because they don’t have enough money — or time — to complete these amazing activities, and often they get lost in the shuffle of living in the real world.
I’d like to introduce you to the Oasis List. It combines the simplicity of a playlist with the joy of a bucket list, but with zero guilt, little pressure, and little cost in terms of either time or money. Your Oasis List will be a list of small- to medium-size moments that bring a little fun, joy, relaxation, and recharging to your day. Not sure what I mean? To give you a taste, here’s a list of potential ideas in order of increasing effort and cost:
Now, on this list, you’ll notice that I’ve mixed in activities that involve other people in addition to yourself. Setting up Oases for people you care about is so essential that I’ll cover that concept in its own section later in the book. But for now, please focus on ideas that are Personal Oases just for you.
Remembering Fun
How do we get started? At some point, someone must have asked you, “What do you like to do for fun?”
For a little experiment, the next time you’re at any kind of mixer, ask people that question and see what response you get. Some people will, without hesitation, tell you something they’re passionate about. Many people — increasingly more and more of us — have a hard time answering that question. Occasionally, people respond with what they think others want them to say. It’s as if we’ve become so saturated with the Culture of WISH — of just working hard because it’s only worth it in the end — that we have forgotten what gives us joy.
To help adults like you and me rediscover what’s fun in our lives, I engaged Touchstone Research to conduct an exhaustive survey of children ages five through eleven. They came from all geographic areas of the United States and from a wide variety of cultural, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
One question I asked them was: “Many adults work too hard and have forgotten how to have fun. What would you say to an adult who has forgotten how to have fun?”
As you can imagine, when you’re grilling kids in this age group, you’re going to get some pretty great stuff. Here are a few examples:
From an eight-year-old boy in California: “Just chill, chill, chill. Time to let it go and have fun, Daddy.”
A five-year-old girl from the Midwest answered, “Be yourself and play with toys.”
Another five-year-old girl said, “Come to play tea party with me and also watch funny cartoons. It helps me a lot, too.”
A six-year-old boy from the South was detailed in his answer: “Play the Xbox with me, or let’s go to the beach. I love the beach because you can make sandcastles, bury people in the sand, and go swimming and collect seashells. You have to use lotion or you will get burned.” Valid point!
Now, it’s not my intent when I share these quotations to encourage you to be childish. Adults should be adults. You don’t need to sing along to the Spongebob Squarepants theme song whilst bouncing on a trampoline and drinking Hi-C out of a sippy cup. A few people may find that to be an Oasis, yet my guess is most would not.
Oases aren’t about being childish but about being more childlike. What’s the difference? One of the best traits children have is that they view the world with wonder. They find fun and play wherever they are, regardless of what they’re doing or what resources they have. It’s true that most kids are plugged in these days, and many will default to playing Minecraft if given the option. That said, based on my personal experience, if you give a child an empty field with a few rocks in it, eventually they will find a way to turn it into a playground. Children are funpreneurs.
This chapter contains a worksheet that is also included in the back of the book. For now, let’s just do a brief walk-through of what this exercise is all about. In the first column, you’ll see a variety of different ages: 10, 15, 20, and 25 plus. There are two simple columns that follow.
In the example above, I wrote in that I liked playing with Legos. I wasn’t Zack the Lego Maniac from the commercials in the ’80s, but I was pretty darn close.
Why did I enjoy it? Well, I enjoyed being able to construct new worlds. I also loved using my Legos to play make-believe. I’d commission family and friends to play along as I created characters and told stories. I vividly remember developing an epic back story for the Lego Spaceman, the one with the cheesy helmet, torn between saving the world and keeping his relationship with his Lego space girlfriend. Yes, I know I was a bit overromantic as a child.*
I share this not to make the process about me but to offer an example of how to complete the worksheet. What is it that you used to like to do as a child? Need help remembering? Let’s get some help from kids. In that survey of five hundred children I mentioned, we also asked them what makes them happy.
The following is a summary of their responses. Take a moment and scan through this list to see whether it reminds you of anything that you used to like in your youth.
That’s quite a list, isn’t it? Did reading it stir up some ideas for you? Fun things you used to do, but somehow forgot?
In case you’re interested in adult-generated ideas, here are some of the answers I received from nonchildren when I conducted a couple of straw polls on social media:
Using the worksheet on the next page or in the appendix, create your initial brainstorming list of things you might like to do for fun. Use the above responses from children and adults as a guide. Create a random list of activities, in no particular order, that you might find interesting.
Next, you can categorize your list. Here’s a worksheet to help you place them into one of five rows. These rows are simply organized according to how long each thing might take you to do, including a space for estimated cost.
In the Estimated Cost column, just write a ballpark figure. Obviously, going for a walk around the block is free. If you put down something more elaborate, like a long vacation, perhaps you should put in a few thousand dollars as the cost. Don’t overthink it right now.
Take the list you created in the brainstorming exercise and transfer each activity that you would enjoy into the worksheet above. Categorize each idea according to the amount of time it would require. Then make a note about the estimated cost next to each activity.
Transferring the brainstormed list to an organized chart will make our next step easier: scheduling and committing to these Oases.