One art of continual losing yet happily retrieving.

The Moment

Most things that keep your mind from wandering, keep you in the moment, in a movement, keep you in a moving rythm, keep you in a perfect balance with your environmentm, are shortcuts to hapiness?

Do you enjoy skiing?

M. Hordijk

Letting your mind wander can be a source of happiness. It's like pressing the 'pause'-button, feeling time without having to move, seeing your surrounding without having to take part in it.

Juliane

I'm not sure whether we have the same denotation with the word 'wandering'. The situation you describe with the pause-button is more or less what I mean: a situation where you just perceive without any conscious judgement or ideas about what you see, is probably very similar to the state of mind of hitting a pingpong ball to the other end of the table again and again.

It's the absence of any conscious thought (with wandering I mean the endless succession of conscious thoughts, maybe that's incorrect), that I think is the key to hapiness. The moment you start to think, you're in trouble.

M. Hordijk

There is definitely an intersection between your concept and mine concerning the situation in which one is happy. But what I wanted to say was, that letting yourself drift from one thought to another and emerging from time to time to perceive what surrounds you can be very pleasant. So what differs between your notion of "wandering" and mine is the way of thinking and what is thought.

pleasant

Yes, this can indeed be very pleasant. When done to the extreme, we could even call it 'leven in de breedte', to paraphrise van der Heijden, Mr. Grunberg's polemic rival from two years ago.

It's somewhat hard to translate, but I also seem to remember Mr. Grunberg writing somewhere that the concept of 'leven in de breedte' means absolutely nothing, so I won't bother searching for an accurate translation.

Its a sport for dogs.

M. Hordijk

I'm more of the opinion that it's not exactly living the moment to its full capacity but a strategy of escapism, perhaps because one isn't capable of putting vitality into real life and thus missing out on it while being busy with the one in ones head.

Happiness

So I need to get rid of my consciousness to get happy, strange... and do I need drugs or lobotomy to achieve this or are there other suggestions?
I don't want to stay the rest of my life in front of a pingpong table trying to catch a frisbee.

Juliane, Hordijk

Have you considered taking a nap?

Oscar

I can't say that I'm exceptionally happy when having a lie-down.

Happiness is commenting on this blog.

My personal shortcut to happiness for today: peltering rain after days of sultriness.