Ever since I came across Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's concept of Flow it has stayed with me as a simple framework and beacon for finding joy, creativity, and total involvement with life.  

"What I 'discovered' was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us come to being happy."

When researching happiness Csikszentmihalyi found that be they climbers, ballet dancers, chess players, or gardeners, people gave surprisingly similar descriptions to how they felt at their peak experience while performing an activity.

When in flow people are wholly focused on the present moment, they experience a strong sense of control, they lose their self-consciousness and their ego, their experience of time changes so that time can fly by or a moment can seem to slow down, and the joy of performing the activity becomes an end in itself.

Flow has a fairly simple set of conditions which I find myself using as a little mental checklist:

When climbing, a prototypical flow activity, it's clear that you are trying to get to the top, you can immediately see if you are making progress and whether an action progressed you or not, and it's wise to pick a wall that is difficult but not impossible, for you to enjoy it. No wonder climbing can be so addictive.

By contrast, it was evident to me that none of these were present when studying for my PhD.

I also like flow because it reminds me that peak happiness is unlikely to be experienced by sitting around watching the TV.

The quote is from, Flow, the psychology of happiness, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who also taught me that any name can work to do great work.

Flow

Perhaps when you first dressed up as a ghost and went round the houses asking for sweets you thought to also ask what the meaning of Halloween was? In case, like me, you didn't, I can share for you that Halloween is a smush together — or portmanteau — of hallow, of old English origin meaning Saint, and e'en, a contraction of the Scots word even meaning eve. So it's really the night before All Hallows or All Saints' Day on the 1st of November when Christians celebrate the lives of past Saints and martyrs. It's also part of the season of events called Allhallowtide including All Souls' Day on the 2nd of November and sometimes days beyond.

The other Halloween traditions come from a mix of sources over hundreds of years that are both complex and somewhat disputed. I did like that the Jack O'lantern, before transferring itself to a pumpkin in the US, was originally carved out of turnips. And I also read that a mighty one quarter of candy sold in the US is sold for Halloween.

Some of the better, sources, explaining the origins of Halloween.

Halloween

It all matters. Be it one person, one bird, or one tree. We are all connected. As John Muir wrote in My First Summer in the Sierra:

"As soon as we take one thing by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

The sketch is Heart Lake in his beloved Sierra Nevada.

Hitched to everything else in the universe