WEEK 76/24: Let It Be Fun Again

I want to get there. And in my determination to get there, I sometimes miss that I am here.

Last week, I wrote about how I keep recreating the same circumstances in my life.

Apparently, I enjoy field-testing my own material.

As I write this, I am six months into owning a chácara, a small farm in Brazil.

I have just bulk-purchased nearly all the lighting fixtures.

I am two weeks away from hosting my first Fourth of July Festa Julina, an event I hope will become a tradition.

There are repairs underway, plans taking shape, people to coordinate, materials to buy, and decisions waiting for their turn.

I am about a hair’s breadth away from rebuilding the exact situation I just called myself out for.

Not because anything is going badly.

That is the sneaky part.

Most of it is going very well.

I am still taking Spanish classes.

I am still volunteering to teach English.

I am developing a point-by-point plan to turn this property into a Portuguese Modern Eco Villa and, eventually, a subdivision project.

I have almost every iron I own in the fire.

And because the irons are interesting, meaningful, and potentially valuable, it is easy to believe that each one deserves my attention right now.

Meanwhile, I have two young cocker spaniels I have wanted since I was first introduced to dog handling back in the 1990s.

They are here.

Not someday.

Not after the roof is finished.

Not after the lights are installed.

Not after the property has reached its final form.

Here.

Running across the grass, inventing emergencies, carrying things they should not have, and looking at me as if the afternoon has already been arranged for our mutual amusement.

Sometimes I forget to enjoy them.

I have not paraglided in more than a year.

And this transition into summer, this invitation to stop developing life for a moment and simply inhabit it, may be one of the hardest things for me to do.

Because the life I imagined is no longer entirely imaginary.

I am living on a small farm in Brazil.

I am building a home and a place where people can gather.

I have the dogs I wanted for more than thirty years.

I have languages to learn, classes to teach, plans worth making, and enough possibility around me to occupy several lifetimes.

It is an epic life.

It is also very easy to treat it as a job site.

Give me a free afternoon and, with very little encouragement, I can make it report to management.

There is always another point to add to the plan.

Another phase to define.

Another improvement that will make the property more complete, more beautiful, more resilient, or more valuable.

I want to get there.

But here is paradise.

Not completed paradise.

Not professionally photographed paradise.

Not paradise with all the fixtures installed and every loose end tied down.

Paradise with ladders against the wall.

Paradise with dogs stealing work gloves.

Paradise with several unresolved drainage questions.

Still paradise.

A Ton of Feathers

Nobody takes your life all at once.

It usually leaves in five-minute pieces.

A small favor.

A quick call.

One more thing before you go.

None of it weighs very much.

That is the problem with feathers.

No single feather seems important enough to refuse.

You would feel ridiculous standing at the door, arms crossed, saying, No, I cannot possibly accept another feather today.

It is only a feather.

So you take it.

Then another.

The email that will only take a second.

The problem you can solve faster than everyone else.

The invitation you do not want to accept but cannot produce a respectable reason to decline.

The empty half-hour in your calendar that looks lonely and therefore must be given employment.

One by one, they settle on you.

Light.

Soft.

Entirely reasonable.

Until one afternoon you discover that you are lying beneath a ton of feathers, wondering why you are tired.

The Useful Person

The world has a keen eye for useful people.

It can spot one across a crowded room.

There you are, it says.

The one who will know what to do.

This is flattering at first.

You become the person people call.

The person who can make sense of the mess.

The person who remembers the detail, finds the number, carries the extra bag, stays a little later, and somehow gets the thing across the line.

Being useful feels good.

Often, it is good.

But usefulness has an appetite.

The more capable you become, the more capacity the world assumes is available.

Not because anyone is necessarily trying to take advantage of you.

People may love you deeply.

They may even tell you that you work too hard.

Then, in the same conversation, they may ask whether you could handle one small thing.

This is not hypocrisy.

It is gravity.

Responsibility rolls toward the person most likely to catch it.

If you do not protect your own capacity, the world will interpret it as an opening.

The world is not malicious.

It is simply an excellent reader of open doors.

The Cleared Field

For the last quarter, we have been talking about capability.

Getting closer to people and places that change what feels possible.

Starting before confidence arrives.

Returning when momentum leaves.

Repeating the work after it stops being interesting.

Building a reliable way to produce results without requiring perfect conditions.

That work mattered.

It still matters.

But perhaps we should remember why we were doing it.

We were not clearing the field so we could build another warehouse.

We were not becoming more efficient so we could fit additional responsibility into every recovered minute.

We were not building a stronger back so life could keep loading it.

The point of becoming more capable was never to spend the rest of your life working on your capacity.

The point was to make more life available.

A little more air in the day.

A little less panic when plans change.

A little energy left after the useful part is over.

A chance to say yes to something that does not improve your résumé, your health metrics, your professional standing, or your understanding of the human condition.

Something pointless.

Something enjoyable.

Something that will not become a system.

The Irons Can Stay in the Fire

The reality is that I have too many irons in the fire.

As usual.

My old solution would be to create a better system for managing the irons.

A dashboard, perhaps.

A color-coded priority structure.

A carefully sequenced plan for becoming less obsessed with carefully sequenced plans.

But perhaps not every iron requires constant handling.

Some things only need to be touched when they need attention.

Then they can be left alone.

The property can take its natural course.

The plans can develop as reality provides better information.

The work can move forward without every part of it being pushed forward today.

There is already enough in motion to carry me through the next two seasons with damn good results.

I do not need to create more momentum.

I need to stop standing over the momentum I already created, asking whether it is moving fast enough.

That is the paradox.

Stepping back does not necessarily produce worse results.

Often, it produces better ones.

You make fewer anxious decisions.

You stop beginning work that is not ready to be done.

You allow information to arrive before locking yourself into an answer.

You give people, projects, animals, land, and even your own thinking enough room to show you what they need.

You are not abandoning the irons.

You are accepting that staring at them does not make them heat faster.

The Clipboard

I say this as someone who can turn almost anything into a developmental program.

Give me a tennis racket and I can produce an improvement arc.

Give me a language and I can build a ten-year plan.

Give me a chácara and apparently I will begin drafting a village.

This ability has served me well.

It has also allowed me to stand outside my own life holding a clipboard.

Was that useful?

Did it count?

Could it be improved?

Should we do it again next Thursday?

Can this become content?

There is a point where self-improvement stops being an act of care and becomes a polite way of telling yourself that you are still not quite acceptable.

You are healthier, stronger, wiser, more disciplined, and more reliable than you were five years ago.

Still, the clipboard follows you into the kitchen.

Apparently, even lunch is under review.

All work and no play makes you dull.

Over-optimization makes you the kind of dull person who can explain, in considerable detail, why dullness is efficient.

It also makes you difficult to be around.

Especially when you are the person you are around most.

A Problem With an Ending

Chronic stress is rarely one enormous thing.

It is the dripping faucet of modern life.

The message unanswered.

The repair waiting.

The decision left open.

The low electrical hum of responsibilities that never quite announce themselves and never quite leave.

Modern stress does not have a final whistle.

It only has another notification.

Play is different.

The body likes a problem with an ending.

A hard tennis point begins, consumes you, and stops.

The dogs break into a sprint, lose their minds for thirty seconds, and collapse in the grass.

You launch a paraglider, leave the ground, and for a while there is nothing to renovate up there.

You jump into cold water, briefly reconsider every decision that led you there, and climb back out.

Someone tells a story badly.

Everyone laughs.

The moment asks something from you.

Then it releases you.

This may be one reason play restores us.

But let us not study it too aggressively.

The moment we turn fun into a carefully calibrated nervous-system intervention, the clipboard is back.

Now the game has deliverables.

Now laughter must demonstrate measurable outcomes.

Now summer requires a business case.

No.

Sometimes the point of playing is that, for a while, you forgot to improve.

One Useless Hour

Here is the practice.

Choose one hour this week and make it useless.

Do not use it for recovery.

Do not use it to deepen a relationship.

Do not use it to become more creative.

Do not use it to gather material.

Do not photograph it.

Do not count anything.

Do not post proof that it happened.

Do something because it is pleasant while you are doing it.

Throw the ball for the dogs.

Drive the better road.

Cook something unreasonable.

Listen to an entire album without folding laundry.

Sit outside until the light changes.

Play a game you are bad at and remain bad at it.

Visit someone without calling it relationship maintenance.

Let the hour fail to improve you.

The exact activity does not matter.

The refusal does.

This may feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

You may think of several productive uses for the time.

Of course you will.

The world has never suffered from a shortage of respectable ways to spend your life.

The question is whether all of them deserve a piece.

Protecting the Person Who Carries It

Taking care of yourself can sound selfish in a culture that praises the person who keeps carrying more.

It is not selfish.

It is countercultural.

There is a difference.

Taking care of yourself may mean allowing someone to be briefly disappointed.

It may mean saying no to a perfectly reasonable request.

It may mean leaving an open hour open while several worthy causes wait nearby, ready to divide it up.

It may mean keeping something for yourself before the world has a chance to assign it.

The paradox is that this usually makes you more dependable, not less.

You make better decisions.

You become easier to live with.

Your help arrives without resentment hidden inside it.

You can remain useful without becoming public property.

You can be generous without giving away the machinery that makes generosity possible.

You can be clutch without spending your entire life waiting beside the phone for the next emergency.

If you do not protect your own capacity, do not expect anyone else to protect it for you.

They may care.

They may help.

They may even insist that you rest.

But they cannot draw the boundary from inside your life.

That line is yours to draw.

Let It Be Fun Again

Summer is arriving.

The work will remain.

The bills will not take the season off.

The roof will still need repairs and attention.

The lights will still need to be installed.

People will still need things.

You do not have to abandon any of that.

You only have to stop offering every unclaimed part of yourself to the pile.

Keep one hour.

Keep one afternoon.

Keep a little strength that does not get converted into service.

Keep one patch of the field wild.

Not because you earned it.

Not because rest will make you more productive later.

Not because joy is secretly good for performance.

Keep it because this is your life, and occasionally you should be present while it is happening.

The feathers will continue to fall.

They always do.

Your job is not to become angry at every feather.

Your job is to remember that a ton of feathers still weighs a ton.

Put some down.

The plans will still be there tomorrow.

The dogs are here now.

Go outside.

Do something that does not count.

Let enjoyment be enough.

The Field Guide can show you the pattern: where responsibility accumulates, how breathing room disappears, and why capability so easily becomes another trap.

The terrain is learning to protect that room inside a real life, where the work is meaningful, the possibilities are exciting, and the requests are often perfectly reasonable.

For this week, begin with one useless hour.

Keep it off the books.