While we see him silently and alone taking a walk in the woods, we hear writer, poet and journalist Jens Meijen talk about happiness. In his video column, he distinguishes types of happiness and observes, among other things, that collective happiness often lies in the future: "It runs a little ahead of you, like a ghost you see disappearing behind a curtain in the distance."

On request of the Winternachten international literature festival The Hague poet Jens Meijen reflected on activism, a state of happiness and the future. The video column was filmed on location by Léa Festraets. It premiered at the Winternachten festival in the programme #SoulCare​: Radical Happiness on Sunday 17 January 2021.

#SoulCare​: Radical Happiness, created by programmer Fleur Jeras, was about happiness and activism, taking its inspiration, among others, from the poem Black Joy from the collection Collective Amnesia by South-African poet and performer Koleka Putuma.

'Joy is an act of resistance' is a slogan that is gaining traction. Can happiness be a form of activism? Is there such a thing as restful resistance? And why is self-care so important? These questions constituted the foundation of the final program of the online Winternachten International Literature Festival 2021.

Jens Meijen (Belgium) completed a Master's degree in Western Literature, Literary Sciences and European Studies at the Catholic University Leuven. He is a journalist, critic and columnist for Flemish publications, an editor of Greenpeace Belgium, and an editor with the literary magazine dw b (Dietsche Warande & Belfort). He was also the (first) Young Flemish Poet Laureate. His poems have appeared in De Revisor, deFusie, Hard//hoofd and Deus ex Machina. Xenomorf (2019), his debut collection, passionately opposes the demise of Earth through pollution, increased production and maximum profits with a great deal of linguistic pleasure; it was awareded the C. Buddingh Poetry Prize. In 2021 he will publish his debut novel De lichtjaren (The Light Years).