Catherine Price - The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

When is the last time you had fun?

Im serious. Think about it. Whens the last time you felt exhilarated and lighthearted? Whens the last time you didnt feel judged, by yourself or other people? Whens the last time you were engaged, focused, and completely present, undistracted by thoughts about the future or the past? Whens the last time you felt free? Whens the last time you felt alive?

Maybe you were laughing with a friend. Maybe you were exploring a new place. Maybe you were being slightly rebellious. Maybe you were trying something for the first time. Maybe you felt an unexpected sense of connection. Regardless of the activity, the result was the same: You laughed and smiled. You felt liberated from your responsibilities. When it was over, the experience left you energized, nourished, and refreshed.

If you are having trouble thinking of a recent moment that fits that description, I hear you. Until recently, I didnt feel like I was having much fun myself.

And then two things happened that transformed me.

The first occurred as a result of the birth of my daughter. After years of debating whether to have a child, followed by more than a year of trying, I became pregnant in the middle of 2014. Instead of expressing our nesting instincts through reasonable, small-scale projects, like closet organization or rethinking our spice rack, my husband and I decided that my pregnancy would be the ideal time to embark upon a full kitchen renovationas in, one that involved ripping the room down to the studs and removing the back wall of our house in the middle of an East Coast January.

With a shared love of creative projects (and control), we also decided to design it ourselves. In my husbands case, this resulted in him spending hours researching kitchen faucets. In my case, it meant figuring out how to incorporate salvaged architectural elements into the kitchen, such as a mirrored Victorian armoire front that I had found in a dead neighbors basement (long story) that I decided would make a perfect faade for a cookbook case and pull-out pantry.

I also spent hours on eBay searching for interesting details that we could add to the kitchen, a quest that left my search history littered with entries such as vintage drawer pull and antique Eastlake door hinge 3x3. (Even today, my eBay watch list still includes items such as Victorian Fancy Stick and Ball Oak Fretwork or Gingerbreadoriginal finish and Old Chrome Art-Deco Vacant Engaged Toilet Bathroom Lock Bolt Indicator Door.)

As my belly grew bigger and our house colder, we had a running joke with our contractorswho by that point had become friendsabout which project would be finished first, the kitchen or my pregnancy. It turned out that I won that contest, not because they were slow, but because I had an emergency C-section five and a half weeks before my due date. Eventually the kitchen renovation was finished, the armoire front became the pantry faade of my dreams, and I could finally stop my eBay searches.

Except I didnt stop. Even though I no longer had any plausible excuse for spending thirty minutes at a time trawling through listings for antique door hardware, I still found myself picking up my phone and opening eBay on autopilot, often during middle-of-the-night feeding sessions with my daughter. Id cuddle her in one arm and hold my phone with the other, using my thumb to scroll. It didnt matter that all of the doors in our house already had knobs and hinges. I was searching for architectural salvage in the same way that other people consume social media: eyes glazed, hypnotized by the stream of images on my screen. The photos were less glamorous, but the compulsion was the same.

And then one night, while I was in the midst of yet another session, I looked away from my screen for a moment and caught my daughters eye. She was staring up at me, her tiny face illuminated by my phones blue light.

This must have happened countless times before, given how often newborns eat and the fact that at that point in my life, my phone was basically an appendage. But for some reasonmaybe the fact that I have a background in mindfulness, maybe delirium caused by sleep deprivationthis time was different. I saw the scene from the outside, as if I were floating above my body, watching what was happening in the room. There was a baby, gazing up at her mother. And there was her mother, looking down at her phone.

I felt gutted.

The image hovered in my mind like a photograph of a crime scene. How had this happened? After all the work Id done to cultivate self-awareness, how had I become a zombie so mesmerized by images on my phone (of door hardware, mind you!) that I was ignoring the babymy babycradled in my arms?

This was not the impression I wanted my daughter to have of a relationship, let alone her relationship with her mother. And I didnt want this to be the way I experienced motherhoodor my own life.

In that moment, I realized thatwithout my awareness or consentmy phone had begun to control me. It was the first thing I reached for in the morning and the last thing I looked at before bed. Any time I had a moment of stillness, it appeared in my hand. On the bus, in the elevator, in the bed, I always had my phone.

I noticed other changes, too, that, when I took the time to think about them, seemed like they also might be linked to my phone. My attention span was shot; I couldnt remember the last time Id made it through even a magazine article without feeling a compulsion to pick up my phone to check for something (really, anything). I was spending much more time texting with friends than talking with them, and was doing things that objectively made no sense, such as checking and rechecking the news even though I knew doing so made me feel bad, or searching for new real estate listings even though we had no intention of moving.

Hours that I might previously have devoted to doing things, like playing music, learning a new skill, or interacting with my husband (as opposed to sitting in the same room together, parallel-scrolling) increasingly were spent staring at a screen. Id morphed from an interesting, interested, independent-minded person into someone who had been hypnotized by a small rectangular objectan object whose apps were programmed by people working for giant companies that stood to profit from getting me to waste my time.

Im not saying that technology is evil and that we should throw our phones and tablets into a river. Some of our screen time is productive, essential, and/or enjoyable. Some of it provides relaxation or escape. But its also gotten out of control. Ive become convinced that our phones and other wireless mobile devices (which are sometimes referred to as WMDsweapons of mass distraction) are pulling our internal compasses seriously offtrack, insinuating themselves into our lives in ways that arent just scattering our attention; theyre changing the core of who we actually