letters and lattes

Have you had something happen recently and your response was, “that wasn’t on my Bingo card!” If not, perhaps you’ve seen it on social media. I love this expression. It is such a humorous way of responding to the unexpected, mostly choosing to laugh at minor inconveniences instead of letting them ruin our day. 

As a teacher the holidays are sacred, there is so much pushed aside to deal with / do / tackle in these precious two weeks. How much can I accomplish? The limit does not exist (well, it does, obviously). I went into the last school holidays feeling pretty run down. The kind of run down where you question, is this just the end of school lag? Or is it a chest infection? Naturally I didn’t go to the doctor, so we’ll never know. The first weekend my husband took the kiddos to his parents and left me home to “rest.” I instead cleaned up a mess that had been bothering me for weeks, thinking once that is out of the way I will be truly able to rest! The unfortunate flow on effect was the clean up meant I overloaded my wardrobe and it collapsed the following day. My wardrobe collapsing wasn’t on my bingo card, yet, here we were. If you can believe it, I literally said that aloud when it happened. I laughed and then I dealt with it, as you do, devoting my precious time to a deep clean I had not prepared for. 

I love this expression because it pushes us to respond to the unexpected with humour and a sense of joy. Life is unexpected. Whether it is something innocuous as a wardrobe collapsing or a magpie flying into your car or coughing so hard you burst a blood vessel in your eye (yep, I’m three for three here) or the significantly more devastating. If these are the things not on our bingo card, what are we preparing for? Are we positioned to look out for joy? Or are we positioned to look out for misery and inconvenience? Because whatever you are positioned to look out for, trust me, you’ll find it. 

I think we have, culturally, set an unfairly high bar for happiness. We have grabbed the old adage from Shakespeare, “expectation is the root of all heartache,” and limited ourselves in what we expect, including joy. However, if we don’t expect happiness, or joy, will we recognise it when we encounter it? If our expectation for success is so high that we can’t laugh at the inconvenient, instead we use that as something else to grumble about, how would we feel anything other than constant disappointment? According to some extensive studies, emotions are contagious. Happiness is a contagious emotion, however, depression is more so.¹ Interestingly, ”people pick up emotions from others, and emotional contagion is especially strong among girls.”² This tells us that not only do our continual moods affect us, they affect those around us. Rather than seeing that as a negative, what if we were to embrace that as an opportunity? An opportunity to affect the culture in our workplaces, communities and families to be more joyous. Perhaps rather than grumbling at the negative we could reflect on our ability and position to affect change. Julia Baird discussed this in her book Phosphorescence and came to the conclusion that “one of the keys to happiness, it seems, is having a low bar.”³ How low is your bar for happiness, dear reader? For joy?

So yes, we can choose to laugh and respond “that wasn’t on my bingo card” when the unexpected arises. But we can also position ourselves towards joy in what we expect and hope will happen in our everyday lives. I decided to do this in a very literal sense and I’m going to make a bingo card for Term 4 and expectantly write the things I’m hoping for on my bingo card. 

I’m hoping I’m going to find some joy. 

I’m hoping that someone is going to make me smile. 

And you know what? I’m going to be happy every time I cross off that bingo card and I’m going to write the person’s name on it. I am committing to positioning myself to look out for joy and I wonder if you would partner with me. 

I have attached the bingo cards I made,⁴ even though they are somewhat specific to my context. Make your own, use a template, it will take ten minutes at most. Ask your colleagues, friends, family to partner with you, maybe offer a prize for the first person who gets bingo! I know it’s a little corny and who has ten minutes to make random bingo cards? But any time taken that results in laughter, is time well spent if you ask me. 

Go well

Steph

¹ Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (USA: Penguin Press, 2024), p. 161

² Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (USA: Penguin Press, 2024), p 162).”

³ Julia Baird, Phosphorescence: On awe, wonder & things that sustain you when the world goes dark (Australia: HarperCollins, 2020), p. 211

⁴ There are lots of free bingo card generators about, but this is the one I used. I’ll attach mine below if you would like the premade ones. 

You can make your own here: https://www.classtools.net/bingo/