In last Friday’s post, When Fun Goes Bad, I described how games and play and fun, because they are living things, reflect all faces of life, all purposes, all tendencies, all weaknesses and strengths. It was that particular observation that led me to focus much of my efforts on describing and developing certain kinds of fun, for example: loving fun, whole fun, healing fun, major and minor fun, meaningful fun and deep fun.
So I reiterate: not any old fun will do. The successful pursuit the playful path, or whatever it is that you want to call the efforts you make to bring fun to life (find fun in life, share fun, create fun, get and stay and help others be happier), relies on the pursuit of those kinds of fun that are healthy (physically, spiritually, socially) and healing.
Today, I find myself particularly enjoying the connotations of the idea of healing fun. I’ve frequently observed how doing something even mildly fun, innocently fun, safe, unthreatening, gently fun – playing a silly game like just about any game you’d find in my Playing for Laughs collection, like, for example, Dum, Dum, Da, Da - how it seems to have a healing effect on the group spirit. On individual spirits as well, for sure. But on the group as a whole, whole as in healthy, as in healed. How people get more relaxed, more responsive, more tolerant of each other, how they laugh more readily, how they accept each other more easily.
The idea of Fun Coaching is very much about that – not about healing with fun, but rather about engaging in the kinds of fun that you can best describe as healing. It doesn’t even have to be organized, or even involve playing a game. It can be fun of a very minor fun kind. It can be a sport, even. And whatever form it takes, fun of the healing kind is the kind of fun to which we (I) maybe should be playing much closer and more consistent attention.
{ 2 comments }
