Fighting weariness with whimsy
I used to be so playful.
As a girl, I had an incredible imagination and loved to express myself. It was my default setting. Whether I was putting on full concerts with my hairbrush microphone in my bedroom mirror, writing short stories, collecting seashells, or spending hours curating the perfect mixtape for each and every mood (cue Brandi’s Epic Dance Mix Summer 1990).
I was a spark-seeker, endlessly fascinated with the intangible beauty of the world around me, and devoured books, movies, and music that nurtured my inner world. Play and creativity were the sun around which my world orbited. And then…
“Earth to Brandi.”
I learned early on in my adolescence that I had to earn my right to play (and rest, but I’ll come back to that). I got my first taxable job at thirteen and began paying my own way. All of a sudden, I had less time and energy for whimsy. I also began to accept that it wasn’t appropriate to be playful anymore. I was getting too old to play pretend, my collection of seashells became clutter, and my mixtapes became increasingly gloomy.
Life without play got heavy quickly. And as I stopped looking for whimsy and sparks of joy, I started noticing how exhausting and unfair the world could be and soon my default setting flipped from playful and optimistic to disillusioned and weary. Before I knew it, I had thirty-plus years of “responsible” adulthood in my rearview and the only thing I had to show for it was burn-out. Even in my faith, at the most devout point of my spiritual life, I could only find God in the grind and I resented it (cue “Brandi’s Epic Deconstruction Playlist 2021”).
I recently watched a conversation on “The Spiritual Practice of Not Resenting Reality” between ordained Lutheran pastor and author Nadia Bolz-Weber and Simran Jeet Singh, professor of history at the historic Union Theological Seminary and national bestselling author of The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life.
In their brief discussion, they touched on the general idea that as human beings we desperately seek control and we rely on God to be omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. But when the world around us is out of control and God (who could if They wanted to) doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it, we are left scrambling to find a reason to hope, or play, or believe in the possibility of joy.
We are trained from a young age to keep our feet firmly planted in reality, but what the hell are we supposed to do when reality sucks?
I don’t think we were given the gift of life to surrender to nihilism. I believe our experience of living is complex and meant to be explored wholeheartedly. I think we are built for exponential noticing. I am convinced that is why social media algorithms are so impactful. The more we look for and make room for negativity, the more we find it. Likewise for joy, hope, and whimsy. I believe that the human experience is non-binary…it is empirical and existential and everything in between. We cannot avoid pain or weariness but we can soften their impact with a little play and whimsy and in doing so, find the restoration we need to keep going.
We are compelled by the social constructs we live within to reject whimsy as childish and unproductive but I submit that doing so is unnatural and not at all what God intended when they first formed man. I am determined to break free of that compulsion. A key step in that endeavor is to surround myself with people who help me see beyond the harshness of my current reality. Bolz-Weber gives credit to her father, who even at the end of his battle with a terminal illness, instilled in her a “faith in the possibility of life.” Singh relies on the Sikh practice of “experiencing the sweetness of life in the smallest things.”
In preparing to write this week’s post, I started looking more intentionally for possibility and sweetness. The more I looked, the more I discovered that there are a lot more people in the world combating their weariness with whimsy than I realized. And that gives me faith in the possibility of life (and the future of humanity).
So, blessed are the adults who make playlists to hype themselves up before a protest, or the ones who gift themselves a sweet treat after a chemo session, or those who create joy journals to combat depression, or play Dungeons & Dragons, or do improv, or learn to play an instrument in their middle age to remember that there is still fun to be had in this world.
Why don’t we go and play? We will all be better for it.
