I am no fun. Throughout my life I have heard this. I have even believed it and felt bad. Being identified as a no-fun person means the activities and interests I enjoy are no fun. Some of those activities and interests included dancing at age six and becoming both dedicated and disciplined from the time I was eight. Neighborhood bicycling, touch football, hide and seek. In the winter, skiing, sledding, backpacking, and snow camping, along with various techniques of fort building depending on the variety of snow. And let us not forget the two months at overnight camp every summer until I was sixteen. These were all fun for me, but in my home and outside there have always been people telling me I am no fun.
Why am I no fun? At this point, I do not care. Why not? Because I am and have been having fun. My fun is different from that of the people who say I am no fun. These people play in a completely different arena than the one in which I have always played. Do not get me wrong. I tried their fun. It was not me; it was not fun for me.
Determined to find out whether I could not play like others or their activities were not for me, I plunged in. College gave me great opportunities to check out this other fun. I pledged a sorority and became president of my pledge class. Parties, games in mud—they were fine. I was fine participating, but when I was to participate with the voting on the new pledge class, for me the fun stopped. “Nice but not necessary” still rings in my ears. Having been called “not fun” in the past did not give me permission to return the favor. I quit.
My time in college was before Title IX. In high school, I lettered in every sport available; college left me with no options. So I decided to go out for cheerleading. Not only was I a Washington University cheerleader; I became a cheerleader for the St. Louis Cardinals football team. Everyone said, “This is fun”. I did it. Until, at a convention for Proctor and Gamble, we did a routine and then handed out Cardinals jackets. That was when the all-male convention started in with “I’d rather have the girl than the jacket”. I felt like a piece of meat. No fun. I quit.
In the ashram, I thought everyone wanted what I wanted: Muktananda, the bliss of freedom. I was so wrong. Working toward what Baba had was hard, not fun. Baba knew people were in the ashram for nothing but a lifestyle, not what was really offered. He would call me naïve for thinking people wanted the Self. People were caught up in the world and wanted only to enhance their sense experience. My thought was, why stay here for that? Go somewhere else for that kind of fun. But for those people, rebellion against the ashram was fun in itself. I was no fun because Baba would send me to find these people and they would not be happy to see me; they felt compelled to tell me, “You are no fun”. Baba always knew I was “no fun”, so he always put me in juxtaposition with the pleasure seekers. Baba was working for me to get okay with not being any fun. But Baba and I had a lot of fun together. I loved Baba’s fun.
It has taken a long time, but I now understand what Baba was trying so hard for me to get. I am no fun to self-indulgent pleasure seekers. I rain on their parades. And they enjoy telling me how much I am no fun. A year ago I wanted everyone to accept the hate inside them—accept that hate and then work to dissolve it away. There were people who thought, “No, I will not accept that I have hate, the hate that I know I have. No, it is too much fun indulging emotions and feeling victimized”. Once more, I was considered no fun.
So here I am, 66 years into “no fun”, and it is okay. I am still the same kind of “no fun” for the same kind of people. My fun is loving Love and learning Love. My fun is cleaning up anything that keeps me from Love. I have to do it God’s way. I will never be fun for the self-indulgent pleasure seeker. I am too busy having my kind of fun to care.
Love is so much more fun. The play that emerges from Love is joyous and shares itself with everyone. The fun that I am not is heedless indulgence in money, sex, food, power, or substances. That is temporary, and the fear of loss is always there. Addiction is the dedication of the pleasure seeker. These pleasures have to be generated externally. Me? I am lazy; I would rather let the Self generate Its play, and I will just quietly function, swimming and dissolving in God and Guru’s grace.
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