Type II Fun by Rev. Oscar Sinclair
Ipswich Unitarians ~ May 14, 2022
Some time ago, Stacie took a break from work to send me an article from the Washington Post, titled “What is Type II fun,” and why do some people want to have it?” This was accompanied by a simple observation: we shall see if this long-distance bike ride we’re planning for this summer is Type II fun.
This is an new language for an old debate in the Sinclair family. One of the first times Stacie met my parents, she asked us what family vacations were like growing up. We told her about the time we all got hypothermia on the side of a mountain, the time we ran out of water on another mountain, the time my father nearly burned down Yellowstone national park, and the time we were trapped in a crowd in Krakow Poland on New Year’s Eve. We finished with this story: Sometime in the early 2000s, we were canoeing in the Shenandoah mountains in Virginia when we were caught in a cloudburst. The temperature dropped down into the 40s, hail started falling, and lighting meant we needed to get off the water – right now. We ended up in a cow pasture, huddled together. My little sister, all of about 9 years old at the time, looked down shivering, saw that she was standing in a pile of cow manure, looked up, and wailed “You know, some families don’t spend their whole vacation wishing it was over!”
Our theme for this morning is Joy.
Stacie and I somehow pursued dating after that conversation, though she was very clear in telling me that this was not a style of family vacation that she expected us to pass on. She much prefers Type I fun.
Here’s how the Washington Post made that distinction:
“A “Fun Scale” is often used by outdoor enthusiasts and endurance junkies to describe the kind of enjoyment they get from their adventures or misadventures, as the case may be. Type II fun can feel terrible while you’re doing it, like climbing up a mountain on a cold winter’s night or running a 100-mile race, but when it’s over, your memory erases the miserable parts and you would do it again — for fun, of course.
On this scale, Type I fun is an activity you’re sure you’ll enjoy, and you do. Think: sharing a nice meal with friends, going to the beach or a chill day of downhill skiing (using the chairlift, like normal people). Type III fun? It’s actually not fun at all. It’s often described as “harrowing,” like getting dangerously lost in the wilderness or trying to swim across the Atlantic. It often involves search-and-rescue, prayers and vows that you’ll never do it again.
But Type II fun? That’s the sweet spot. It challenges you without putting you in danger — and it’s often uncomfortable but in ways that also make you feel alive.
REI’s mountain climbing blog describes Type II fun [as] “miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect. It usually begins with the best intentions, and then things get carried away.” My family vacations had a lot of type II fun in them.
We talk a lot in Unitarian Congregations about the hard times in life. Type III fun: experiences that aren’t fun at all, but are harrowing. Experiences that we finish and we’re glad to never to again. Grief, worry, anxiety.
I use that Maggie Smith poem, the one about Good Bones, constantly. It defines much of my ministry. A colleague of mine, when asked to explain what her job is, once said “I get up in front of people once a week and tell them a better world is possible. Then, a week later, when all evidence has been to the contrary, I repeat myself.” We are trying to sell our children the world – or at least convince them (and maybe ourselves) that we can fix it together.
And there is a lot that needs fixing. From the big tragedies – war, famine, climate change, institutional racism to the little ones – loneliness, grief, illness, there is so much in the world we would change if we could. Coming to terms with that, changing what we can and accepting what we cannot, is the topic of most of our Unitarian religious life.
Put a different way: I’m relatively new in the UK, so I don’t know the hymnal here well. And this week I went paging through the subject list in the back of the hymnal, looking for “Joy.” There is no section labeled “Joy.” But there is – in a single sequence – “Despair, Death and Grief, Disability, Disasters and Emergencies, Doubt and Uncertainty, and Easter.”
Last week a friend of mine – another Unitarian minister who just started her sabbatical about a few weeks ago – texted me, saying “I just feel like I’m about to cry all the time. Who knew sabbatical sucked so much? I’m find, I just thought it would be woooo instead of like “oh shit my feelings are catching up to me.” I replied that I spent the first several months of mine in a low-level existential crisis, and that if Sabbaticals are about renewal, to do that renewal well it is necessary for feelings to catch up with you.
But that is not all of life, all of renewal. We are not simply meaning-making creatures, trying to make sense of the senseless. A faithful life also needs a healthy serving of joy, of fun.
And just like the many kinds of Love in the reading this morning, there are many kinds of joy in the world. We miss something when we discount all the experiences that can -maybe only in retrospect- bring us joy.
This week Stacie went on leave from her job for the next six weeks, the remainder of our time here in Sevenoaks. And on Wednesday we did very little – we cleaned a bit, got the kid to school, and then spent a few hours at the White Hart pub in Brasted, doing nothing in particular but enjoying a beverage, a meal, and each other’s company. Simple Type I fun – an activity that we were sure that we would enjoy, and we did. It is also a kind of renewal, after a hard year of worrying about local politics in Lincoln, sad about the war in Ukraine, anxious about our parents’ health, to simply be together and be joyful. Laughter is renewal. To be joyful and unhurried is not just good for its own sake, it is a kind of resistance to the pressures that break us down as people.
We are also, last week and this week, hiking the North Downs Way from Otford to Cantebury. We’re hiking in the day, then coming back to Sevenoaks to pick up Ailish from school and have dinner at home. We have made it as far as Hollingbourne, about 40 miles down the trail from Otford. 15 mile walks with a time limit are definitely closer to type II fun, but even that experience of working our bodies hard to get from point A to B is meditative and renewing in a way.
To cultivate joy, to renew faith, is necessary for any work that we hope to achieve in the world. So often when we are trying to find the capacity to do more, we try to find some complicated formula for success: if I balance my life in this way, I can fit in the kid’s activities on Monday night, volunteering on Wednesdays, and laundry can happen in this forty minute break- and if I do all that, I’ll be able to go to take the day off on Friday instead of spending it at home writing a sermon. [clearly this is not a hypothetical example]
But what that example misses is that renewal is not a question balancing all the must-dos in such a way that we are able to do the most of them. It is instead about doing the basic things well. “Don’t forget to drink water and get some sun,” the joke goes, “you’re basically a houseplant with more complicated emotions.”
Or somewhat more poetically, here’s Giles Deleuze: “…we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing li’rttle gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.” (Negotiations, 1985)
Drink water. Get sun. I would add “get sleep, eat good fun, move your body.” Find little gaps of solitude and silence. To that list, at least for myself. And even within that simplicity, joy takes many forms: I am a product of my family. There’s plenty of renewal that for me is probably type II fun: a hard workout is rarely fun in the moment, but sitting on the back porch with a beer, after an hour of burpees and deadlifts feels great. Stacie, on the other hand, would rather just sit on a beach somewhere, preferably with a drink served in a hollowed-out pineapple. I am coming around to her position.
Just like we might have a taxonomy of joy (type I, type II, etc), we might also have a taxonomy for spiritual renewal. I’d suggest, as a start, that there is a difference between solitary or communal renewal, and that we are each often drawn to one or another.
Solitary renewal is what we often think about when we think of ‘renewing faith’ – those moments frequently seen in movies, where the hero goes off on a long pilgrimage, or disappears into the wilderness to find themselves. It is an introverted path, and one that I know well. And it doesn’t need to be big or long – for me it looks like going on a bike ride or playing a game of golf alone, just spending time in the quiet, with my own soul as company. Sometimes it can be long – spending a week hiking the West Highland Way was absolutely solitary renewal time.
But we might also think about communal renewal – it is, after all, what we do every time we come to church on Sunday, right? We gather together with a group of people and do something together because it will deepen our joy. That’s worship, but it’s also game nights, dances, time with family. Renewal grounded in relationship is distinct from that solitary spiritual renewal.
We could go even further. If I had a whiteboard, I would set this up as a matrix, with type I and II fun, and solitary and communal renewal.
Solitary renewal, type I fun: laying in a hammock reading a good book in the garden.
Solitary renewal, type II fun: training for a marathon.
Communal renewal, type I fun: game night at the Unitarian Church of Lincoln. A church lunch here in Sevenoaks maybe, or coronation festivities.
Communal renewal, type II fun: Going to a Baltimore Orioles game. In the moment, it is an experience of collective suffering, but one you remember fondly.
A sabbatical, intentionally, has opportunities for all four.
The point here is this: Everything I’ve said from pulpits while in the UK has been true. Often, the world is a terrible place, even if we keep that from our children. Despair is an easy place to fall into, and we don’t want to fall into the equally easy trap of chirping on about ‘good bones,’ papering over the hard places. It is a tricky spot, being a Unitarian in 2023. You’ve got some hard work ahead of you as a congregation: this week I’ve been meeting with members here one on one to get a clearer sense of the opportunities and challenges this community faces, and there are real challenges here, that will take hard work and occasional drudgery to fix. The AGM last week started to lay that out, and keeping this place going will require all of you.
But I hope you also remember joy. It’s May. The world is coming awake, and slowly warmer. Back in the states, Baseball season has just started, and the Baltimore Orioles are winning games. It won’t last, but I’ll have fun going on the ride. When I was leaving for sabbatical, I asked my colleagues what advice they had for me. “Remind your congregation to have fun. It should not be drudgery, if you are joyful and they miserable for five months, it’s going to be a rocky reentry.” As April turns to May, and I start thinking about leaving Sevenoaks, that’s one message I want to leave you with. Find joy in this place.
We are about the work of love. That’s what we are renewing, each time we gather together or spend some time intentionally alone.