Experience

James, as I'm sure you have gathered by now, I am a worst-case-scenario kind of gal. My mind will always seek out the worst possible thing that could happen and how I might have to deal with the consequences. Don't ask me why I am this way (although I'm sure being an oldest child has something to do with it). What I can say for certain is that I am ill qualified to speak with any real certainty on the topic of "fun". I mean, I love fun as much as the next guy, but I don't get quite as caught up in it. I immediate fast forward to the lands beyond fun. You know, when shit gets real.

So, what does fun mean to me? It's the beginning. It's where we all start off. Children have fun all the time. Because they're at the beginning. We think college is going to be tons of fun, and when we first get there, it is. But a few weeks in and we realize what we've signed up for. Falling in love is so much fun, some people do it more often than they change the sheets on their beds. But you know what falling in love eventually leads to? Herpes. Or marriage. Or being dumped. And if you play your cards right, you might get all three.

See what I mean about worst case scenarios? But I digress.

I guess the most important thing to remember about fun is that it will always lead you somewhere. Whether that place changes your life for the better (ex. having children), or for the very very worst (ex. an unintended dip with crocodiles), it's going to lead you somewhere. Because fun is only the beginning.

Fun is an excellent catalyst. That's the role it plays in my life. Fun always becomes something else. It's a transitive state. And when my worst-case-scenario brain gets way too caught up in all the "what if"s and "what now"s, I like to listen to a song that I think lays things out very simply.

The Remedy

Now, I know you're tempted to listen to the first few seconds and then turn it off. But really listen to this song. Listen to the lyrics. It touches on some important things. Like inevitability and futility and where fun takes us. And why we should just dive into fun in spite of it all.

Maybe it's because this song released around the same time that I first started realizing how fleeting fun can be. Or maybe Jason Mraz always seems to have the right words to fit my circumstances. He originally wrote this song after finding out that a close friend had cancer. He explains that the remedy to his friend's circumstance is the experience of having it. That's all that really matters: your experiences. Because it all amounts to nothing in the end. None of us get out of this world alive. The only way to get through life (or the only way that seems to be worth anything) is to experience it. And that's what fun is - a way to get at experience.

So here is the final point I want to make: fun begets experience and experience begets art. We create art to convey an experience that we've had or that we want to have. Or at least that's how I approach it. Writers go out into the world and do fun and often stupid things in order to experience a moment or an emotion or a state of being. And then they hole up in a little studio and solemnly convey those experiences in a compelling way. Fun is fuel! It gets us to the good stuff. To the hard stuff. To what makes life a shared and universal experience. The best art conveys what fun can't. The best art shows us what comes after fun. Because after fun, we find out what we're made of.

-Jen