Pleasure vs Gratification

Thinking about skiing helps me understand the difference between "pleasure" and "gratification", concepts described in the book Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment.

The author, based on decades of research in Positive Psychology, urges readers to fill their lives with both "pleasures" and "gratifications".  So what's the difference?  Pleasures involve more of a passive enjoyment of the senses.  Listening to music.  Enjoying the beach.  Appreciating art.  It can be more active:  sex, a massage, a hike through a beautiful forest.  But it's best taken slow, savored, drawn out to maximize the pleasure.

A gratification is something you enjoy doing, but it challenges you.  You get totally engrossed in the activity.  You have to exercise your physical, spiritual, and or intellectual "muscles" to do the activity with excellence.  It leaves you feeling very satisfied, competent, and accomplished but you might not feel any emotion in particular while it is going on because you are so "in the zone".

I think of skiing.  When I'm going down the hill, carving turns to the best of my (mediocre) ability, I'm engaged in one of my favorite "gratifications".  When I stop at the crest of a hill, before continuing my descent, and take in the splendor of snow covered mountains, sunlight and shadows on the snow, a lake in the distance, and my long, deep breaths--at this time I've switched to "pleasure".