Saunders by Surprise

9.

Saunders was taken by surprise. She hadn’t seen this side of him before. As the ‘pep talk’ concluded, she tried her best to fit the square peg of her current understanding of ‘meaning’ into the round hole of possibility. It was like walking into a dark room and switching on a thousand neon lights. The idea he had presented for their consideration was unlike anything he had ever said before. To this point it had always been direct orders, commands, standard operating procedures, protocols or principals. But this? This was philosophy, metaphysics and borderline new-age, feel-good psycho-babble. A-Holes Fables, she laughed. 

The meaning of fun? Get outta here.

It was almost a relief, a return to the formality they had all grown to appreciate when it was loudly announced the break would end in five minutes and the return trek would commence in double-time cadence. She quickly wrapped up her nutrition and hydration tasks making sure that no trace of the activities remained behind. 

She considered the parable again, this time from a completely different angle. The part of the story that impacted her the most, that presented the dramatic shock, was the connection between the concept of ‘fun’ being not so much about the absence of challenge, but more about the absence of anger.  She considered that fear might be a better emotion than anger to use in this theorem.  She wondered if they were interchangeable, synonyms of the same etymological origin. Fear and anger. Using her background in rhetoric and calculus she played with the formula ending with a back of the envelope equation suggesting that Fun equals the empty set of Fear and Anger.  Or that once Fear and/or Anger were subtracted, removed,  from the equation, only fun, or its subsets of accomplishment, joy, reward, value and victory remained. Like a microwave taking all the cold out of a glass of water, leaving only the hot. Was this what he was suggesting?

Or not?

As they shouldered backpacks and slung gear preparing for the return trip she recognized an old and familiar pattern. She loved the challenge of a new problem. This one, the parable at the turn as she was now calling it, had turbo-charged her imagination. ‘Para’ meaning ‘along-side’,  a companion to something greater, larger or more urgent. An esoteric variation with immediate utility. 

They began their hike, she at the point. 

“Are we having fun yet?” He asked joining her.