What Happened To Fun?

“All art is a work in progress. It’s helpful to see the piece we’re working on as an experiment. One in which we can’t predict the outcome. Whatever the result, we will receive useful information that will benefit the next experiment. If you start from the position that there is no right or wrong, no good or bad, and creativity is just free play with no rules, it’s easier to submerge yourself joyfully in the process of making things. We’re not playing to win, we’re playing to play. And ultimately, playing is fun. Perfectionism gets in the way of fun. A more skillful goal might be to find comfort in the process. To make and put out successive works with ease”.

--Rick Rubin, "The Creative Act: A Way of Being"

Rick is right. Perfectionism does gets in the way of fun. I would go even further. When we become grown-up’s, it can seem that anything and everything gets in the way of fun. This is such an important thing for me. And it should be for you, too. So fervently do I believe this, I’m bringing back one of my early posts from my newsletter, Strange Alchemy. Hope you enjoy it.)

Remember toys?

I know you’re all grown up now. Bigger fish to fry and all that. But it wasn’t always like this.

You weren’t always swept up in car loans and dinner parties and dry cleaners who swear up and down that hole in your favorite skirt was there when you brought it in.

Remember how you felt the first time you saw Toy Story?

Something bubbled up inside you there in the dark. It did, didn’t it? A faint sadness. Wispy and fragile.

A shadow at the edge of your memory, gone missing the day you walked away from your childhood.

The day you were Andy.

Ask us all these years later, and we’ll tell you there’s no such thing as dragons and flying robots and the evil emperor Zurg.

But there was a time when we would have called bullshit on that because we knew we could will things into existence with nothing but our imaginations.

There were no rules back then. If we said the sun was purple, it was purple. Unless it was green. Or black. Anything but yellow.

Rules might have been in someone else’s dictionary but they weren’t in ours.

We flew X-Wings. We drove SlotCars like we were at the Indianapolis Speedway instead of in our bedroom. We longed for a Barbie DreamHouse. We were masters of the LEGO universe.

You remember.

I know you do.

Game Boy. Pound Puppies. American Girl. Magic 8 Ball. Mr Potato Head. Transformers. Star Wars action figures. LiteBrite. Etch-A-Sketch.

And the freedom. Holy mother of God, the unbridled creative freedom.

Somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that toys and grownups do not compute.

That jet skis and snowboards and vintage pinball machines are acceptable playthings, but Star Wars action figures aren’t.

That we can’t binge watch White Lotus one minute, then turn around and play with our Etch-A-Sketch or our little green army dudes.

If we only knew what we were missing.

In 1963, an episode of The Twilight Zone entitled “Kick The Can” appeared for the first time. In it, one of the residents of The Sunnyvale Nursing Home dreams of being a kid again.

He’s convinced that the secret to going back is a game of kick the can, that if you just played kick the can like you used to, you’d transform into a 12-year-old, like all those years of growing old never even happened.

“It’s a special summer ritual. Did you ever stop to think of it? All kids play those games, and the minute they stop they begin to grow old. It’s almost as if playing kick the can keeps them young.”

I don’t know about kick the can.

And I sure in hell know that a toy isn’t going to literally turn me back into a runty kid whose only responsibility was to do his homework, feed the dog and wash my dad’s car. But I will tell you this.

I lost something when I grew up.

I’ll bet you did too.

I didn’t know it at the time. There were too many other things going on in my life. Girls. Sports. Rock and roll.

And while I like to think my career has had more of its share of creative accomplishments, I never again possessed the raw, unrefined imagination I had when I was a kid.

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