one more thing

yesterday, while getting my haircut, the barber and i chatted up a storm, which is, in large part, why i returned to this particular barber. somewhere along the way she said something to the effect of "a busy mind is a happy mind."

i debated internally whether i really wanted to "go there". imho, the opposite is true. it's the beer-swilling std-swinging brainless party guys that are happiest, and i would never accuse those guys of having busy minds. you know the type i'm talking about.

no, us thinkly types, the ones with busy minds, are rarely happy -- unless we get our shit sorted out and figure out the happy-knack.

then it's the best of both worlds. i know how to be as happy as the happiest coke-fiend, for free, and i can code up a mean bit of C++, too. in fact, if i put my mind to it, i can do both at once.

anyhow, to the barber, i half-heartedly offered that perhaps the folks with the least going on upstairs are actually the happiest, to which she offered a counter that, to my mind, seemed more to bolster my argument than hers, having something to do with how she didn't mean happy, tv-consuming couch-potatoes, but instead, people who keep their mind busy by keeping themselves busy. i wimped out and conceded the point rather than point out that, at least in my case, i rarely find my mind so "busy" with whatever activity is occupying me that i haven't got time to think about 2 or 3 other things in the "back of my mind", at least one of which, quite often, is more a cause of worry than happiness.

but that's just me. and maybe that's my point.

ah.

i re-read before posting, for a change, and now i see that i am wrong and she was right. or, we were both right.

not "busyness" in my case. focus, concentration, singlemindedness, happiness, and someday, samadhi. but i think my point was (and is) that them's what already have very little going on can more easily than me achieve the singlemindedness that puts a grin on my face.

there. thesis, antithesis, and.. uh. that other thing.