ode to summer part 2: fun

2

August 23, 2013 by Caity Stuart

When I left Keene, NH for the coast of Maryland back in May, I had NO clue what to expect. Would I enjoy being on the beach? Would I be able to pick up the content? Would I even make friends? I was going to be a little older, after all (or so I thought). Well, regardless, I made sure that I would counquer this summer with two goals in mind:

1. to re-investigate if the National Park Service was a career path that I wanted to continue pursuing.
2. to discover how to do interpretation (aka talking to/educating the general public) on the natural environment (as opposed to my previous experiences with history).

Whenever I make goals I tend to either forget that I made them or, yeah, that’s pretty much it. But magically these goals stuck around. So what was the verdict for the two? While I continually churned on these two, determined that I would get to the bottom of these two, I discovered a completely different answer to the two of these goals.

Disclaimer: before I reveal one of the major lessons of the summer, I realize that what I learned may seem very simple, may be followed on your part with a “well, duh!” I get that. But have you ever had the experience where you hear something time and time again but it isn’t until you have that one special experience that you truly learn that lesson? Yes, that’s what happened to me this summer. Ok, so you ready?

I learned that with whatever I do, especially in my professional pursuits, I need to make sure that both myself and those that I am “teaching” are having fun. A lot of the content that environmentalists preach can be very scary, if nothing else very serious. Because let’s be honest, the changing climate and how we as humans interact with the natural environment are very serious issues. For some reason, the more and more I become saturated with the content of climate change, I begin to conjure up images of me being on the frontline of one of the many French Revolutions ready for battle. While eager people ready to change the world is certainly helpful, I’m pretty sure there is no reason to be militant about it. Quite contrary, actually. I learned first hand from some of our programs that we provided to the public this summer that people just want to have fun (insert “duh”). Now, I don’t know if it was me being a stuck up academic (which very well could have been) but I for the longest time thought that having fun got you nowhere in the learning spectrum. In fact it just stalled the process.

Bull. shit.

I saw first hand this summer that if one was having fun one was more willing to invest in the topic, in the resource and eventually was more willing to take care of it. And if not, who cares, right? They were still growing as a person and finding ways to live fully, to smile, to laugh. And on the flip side, I found that if I was having fun with the content, the visitors, as well as my co-workers, I was all the more eager to get into work, to learn more, and to do a good job.

Even while I write this I can’t help but think that this should be so commonplace. However it has never been so for me. Ask my brother and he would easily tell you that 9 times out of 10 I would chose the practical choice hands down. But I guess it wasn’t until I lived on the beach, played in the Bay, and laughed constantly with my friends that I fully learned that if having fun is at the center of everything that I do then life will be pretty grand. 

yep, I catch blue crabs now.