I often ponder on the nature of being happy and having fun. Happiness is elusive, but we all have an idea of what it is about. I will talk about that another day, as I think there are some interesting angles.<\/p>\n
But there is the question of having fun. I have more trouble identifying that …<\/p>\n
An old joke: A good friend is someone who bails you out of jail after a particularly good night out; a best friend would be sitting next to you saying “Wow! That was fun.”<\/p>\n
Notice the tense of the verb. The fun was in the past. Is that always the case? No – I think that fun can also be in the future. What I think is rare is for fun to be in the present. How often can you respond positively to the self-question “Am I having fun right now?”? Maybe it is just because when you are doing something that might be described as fun, you are too wrapped up in doing<\/em> it to think about how you feel<\/em> about it. Perhaps you need to compare with life’s experiences in order to rate something as fun.<\/p>\n I can recall a single exception to this rule in my life. Some years ago, I was fortunate enough to participate in a business meeting in the far North of Finland – above the Arctic Circle. I had the opportunity to try one of a number of outside activities and I chose [for no reason that I can now identify] to try a dog sled. There was only a small group of us and, after some brief training, we were sent off with sleds and packs of husky dogs. It was like nothing I have ever done before or since. At one point, I was some distance from my colleagues and the leader – essentially alone [with my dogs]. It was getting dark and all I could hear was the panting of the dogs and “swish” of the sled through the snow. I recall having the thought: “Yes. This is me having fun.”<\/p>\n As a postscript, later that day we all had the chance to ride on a cart pulled by a reindeer, which seemed reluctant to haul the weight. That evening, we were served reindeer meat as part of the meal. I joked to the senior executive, who was sitting opposite me, that this was the same beast that had failed to deliver earlier in the day. Many months later, there was a big sales meeting, where this executive was talking about his experiences through the year. He showed a picture of a reindeer and made the same joke. I still await the royalty check.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I often ponder on the nature of being happy and having fun. Happiness is elusive, but we all have an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71677,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[302],"industry":[],"product":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-off-topic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71677"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3420"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10086,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3420\/revisions\/10086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3420"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=3420"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=3420"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}