Today I was asked the most difficult question to date. I was put on the spot. I had no idea how to answer this powerful, sophisticated, clearly well-prepared and thought out question: “What do you do for fun?”
I will set the scene.
My neighbor had invited me to work out with him as part of his regional group from F3 Nation. He had joined the group, gotten in better shape and highly recommended that I enlist with him. I replied in the affirmative annnnnnnd my wife promptly gave birth to our son. Fast forward five months and I finally was able to participate in the workout on this fateful Tuesday morning.
This participation takes commitment. Commitment both mentally and physically: 1) Voluntarily wake up before 5 AM; 2) Actively drive yourself to a local park without your children; 3) Commit to speaking with other humans.
Now I don’t want to brag, but I work out. N(o)B(ig)D(eal). However, F3 is no ordinary workout. I couldn’t keep up. My pride tells me that this should have been expected, being that it is a completely different type of workout routine, but my visible tears and eventual whimpering in the parking lot of a community park painted a different picture. When you are constantly answering questions with, “No, I’m good” or “Yes, I am fine” or “Please call an ambulance,” you start to wonder if you and your wife should have more kids just to have an excuse to get out of these F3 workouts.
Mercifully, the workouts came to a halt and the group came together for one last stretching session. These were some of the most genuinely kind men that I have ever cried in front of and I couldn’t tell you any of their names. Unbeknownst to me, F3 policy states that everyone is assigned a nickname, so you could imagine the look of confusion on my face when two men initially greeted each other as “Hamster Dance” and “Blitzkrieg.”
It was in this stretching circle of trust that I was asked what I do for fun. This was definitely an attempt to gain more knowledge about me because in the small, 45-minute sample size of flailing and sadness I had just displayed to them, their nicknames could seemingly only range from hilarious to dehumanizing. And as I had mentioned before, these guys were kind, so they pressed me on this question of fun.
I had no answer. I was lost. Just staring. Searching. What do I do for fun? My answer, if it could pass as an answer, was “I read. I work out…. uhh, I read.” That was it. That was my response. Now, I consider myself intelligent, having gone to school for 70% of my life, and all that I could muster in response to this extremely complex question was that I read (twice) and that I work out, which was absolutely up for debate. Eventually we settled on a nickname from a book that I had just read (‘Big Brother’ from 1984), but after my showing both physically and intellectually, I would be surprised if I ever show my face again…. anywhere.