idea entry: week 11: november 11

word of the week: HAPPINESS

I'm not sure there's an image to visual portray happiness. I think it's one of those things that when you come upon it, you will feel it, breathe it, and live it. It's indescribable and too many parts of it are intangible. If you close your eyes and let your thoughts go, I believe you can see it in your mind for a brief moment.

quotes:
"The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy." -Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

"When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent." - Meng Tzu, China, 3rd Century. BCE.

"If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator." - W. Beran Wolfe

"People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within." - Ramona L. Anderson

annotated source:
"Csikszentmihalyi's big discovery is that there is a state many people value even more than chocolate after sex. It is the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one's abilities. It is what people sometimes call "being in the zone." Csikszentmihalyi called it "flow" because it often feels like effortless movement: Flow happens, and you go with it. Flow often occurs during physical movement - skiing, driving fast on a curvy country road, or playing team sports. Flow is aided by music or by the action of other people, both of which provide temporal structure for one's own behavior (for example, singing in a choir, dancing, or just having an intense conversation with a friend.) And flow can happen during solitary creative activities, such as painting, writing or photography. The keys to flow: There's a challenge that fully engages your attention; you have the skills to meet the challenge; and you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step (the progress principle). You get flash after flash of positive feeling with each turn negotiated, each high note correctly sung, or each brushstroke that falls into the right place. In the flow experience, elephant and rider are in perfect harmony. The elephant (automatic processes) is doing most of the work, running smoothly through the forest, while the rider (conscious thought) is completely absorbed in looking out for problems and opportunities, helping wherever he can." (Haidt, 95)

[Haidt, Jonathan. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic, 2006. Print.]

What does it take for us to engage ourselves into this state of "flow"? It seems quite easy to enter into the state. Do something you love and let your thoughts be submerge in it. However, it is not as easy. Don't deny it, but even when we are doing something we love, our thoughts drift away from the task, away from the current location, away from the moment. It is not because we do not love or enjoy what we are doing, but we tend to take on too much at the moment even if we are not available to do everything we wish to do. (Example, you are at work, sitting in the office, but your mind thinks of the dry clean that needs to be picked up, the fridge is empty and needs to be filled, the dog needs to be walk, the meeting tomorrow. Your mind is capable of adding all these task to your to-do list, however, just relax, you are not able to do those things at the specific time. Why not let the body take care of it later. Check off the to-do list with both the body and mind as a unit of one, instead of letting the mind do it on its own, because the body still has to do it, again later. Why not do it once and for all?) We cannot enter into that state of "flow" if we are split in terms of the location of our mind and our body.

summary:
I more I think about the driving force of my project, the more I think of the my own search for understanding of something that is as fleeting and intangible as shooting stars, contentment. I am in constant search for my own peaceful state of mind. I am frustrated, sometimes, at my own lack of ability to be in the moment, to be both mentally and bodily in the same place. It has prompted me to extend beyond myself. By studying others, I hope to learn something about myself. From where I started with photographing people in their space, doing their thing, it was too indirectly. I had hope for the individual to uncover something about themselves that they had not realized. I gave them the chance to analysis themselves, but the result was not very focus.

With what I am doing now, I believe it to be more direct. I am asking them straight on to identity their state of mind. The physical locating of their body is visual available, the portraits capture the individuals where they physically and bodily are. The writing helps me to locate where their subconscious has taken them. All of this brought the idea of happiness to mind. I was told that happiness was being in the moment. The experience of contentment was being both physically and mentally present, both in sync with one another. This is harder done than said. Because our minds are drifters, our subconscious is the elephant that loves to roam and graze. And the rider sometimes has trouble steering the elephant and keeping him at a stand still.