As I mentioned last week, for my first round of play with the Feelings Collector I chose to invite the feeling of “flow” into my life. Early on in the year, Natalia—in her role as MC for the game—sent us a prompt to brainstorm about “portals” to our chosen feeling. Feelings portals are those areas of activity in our life where we want to have more of the feeling, where we think we might find more of the feeling, or simply a point of departure for an open-ended exploration into the feeling. My natural inclination was to take the free-form approach and I began to play through the portal of reading.
Given my academic background, I instinctively reached for a scholarly volume on flow. The first book that I read on the topic was “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. “Flow” was not only my point of departure, but it also became my north star over the course of the year. “Flow” is a remarkable book. The acuity, brevity, and clarity of its prose are exemplary. But the book’s erudition and the significance of its findings are what made it truly special for me.
Throughout 2020, I used Csikszentmihalyi’s definition of flow as a key to guide my journey. He defines flow as the optimal state of inner experience, or, as order in consciousness. This psychological state is characterized by effortless control over attention and the harmonious movement of psychic energy felt while engaging in an activity in the world. Put differently, flow is a quality of experience marked by total involvement in of life, deep enjoyment, and creativity. Most simply, flow is the feeling of “being in the zone.”
As the year unfolded, my understanding of Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow deepened and my sense of its implications grew. Was I able to feel more flow as a result? I would say on balance, yes. I certainly felt it while playing the Feelings Collector, but there were other areas where I still would like more flow. As I discovered, knowledge of what flow is and how Csikszentmihalyi tells us it can be accessed is no guarantee that you actually will have more of it. In fact, I discovered as many barriers to flow as portals over the course of the year, but that is a story for another time.
At any rate, one of the most compelling things about the book is Csikszentmihalyi’s demonstration—based on the results of decades of psychological experiential surveys—the ways flow can be actively cultivated and not just left to chance. The book teaches us, using real life examples from study participants’ lives, how we can reliably enter a flow state, and thereby discover true happiness and increase our quality of life.
So, what else is there to know about flow and how we can find more of it in our lives?
Flow, the optimal state of orderly consciousness, is the result of willfully focusing our attention and ignoring distractions in the pursuit of a practical activity. Flow is the opposite of a state of psychic entropy, in which random patterns of thought dominate our consciousness and over which we feel little or no sense of control. Flow consciousness is one where we are so engrossed in whatever we are doing that entropic thought patterns fade from awareness because we are enjoying playing with and transforming opportunities for action in our surroundings. The diagram below summarizes where flow can be found in most any activity; Csikszentmihalyi’s go-to example is tennis. I often thought about salsa dancing.
Many activities, and indeed, much of life itself can produce flow consciousness if done in a certain way. This approach involves becoming aware of a given situation; recognizing in that situation opportunities for action; taking those actions; and investing such a degree of attention in those actions such that you “lose yourself” in the action.
Practical activities that are most amenable to feeling flow have the following characteristics:
they involve confronting achievable tasks,
they afford the ability to concentrate,
they have clear goals,
they provide immediate feedback,
they make it possible for all else to be blocked out during,
they provide a sense of control over actions,
they reduce concern for the self and the ego, and
they alter your sense of the duration of time.
Many bodily techniques are amenable to practicing entering a flow state. These practices order physical sensation by finding, testing, and surpassing the limits of the body in many domains: sports, yoga, martial arts, sex, connoisseurship, etc. But there are also many mental techniques as well, including meditation, prayer, memory-games, scholarship, and so on. I will come back to these techniques again and again in subsequent posts. Much of my journey in 2020 could be characterized as a search for these techniques to test out.
One thing main thing I learned from this search is that what you do is less important than how you do it. Ordering our consciousness and “getting in the zone” is a skill that applies across domains, and it is a skill that can be taught. Some people are naturally apt in attaining flow, and blessings be on those of them who had the reflexivity and wherewithal to write down their thoughts on the matter. For the rest of us, it takes the intention and will to practice to get there.
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This post has already become longer than I intended, so I will stop here for now with two thoughts about why this book has been so important for me.
Flow activities have as their primary function the provision of enjoyable experiences. Thus, the extent to which we are able to order our consciousness in the pursuit of practical activities and thereby generate flow-states is directly correlated to our overall quality of life.
The most radical proposition Csikszentmihalyi forwards in “Flow” is: the transformation of practical activity into flow consciousness is the primary skill that begets all other skills-acquisition. That is, to the extent that you are able to generate and harness flow, you are also able to develop new practical skills by concentrating more highly and sustaining attention for longer intervals.
These two qualities—enjoyment and the empowerment that comes from harnessing your attention—were what drew me to choosing flow for the Feelings Collector. They are also important in understanding a crucial component of Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of how we can develop an autotelic personality that more readily and naturally pursues and accesses flow.
Until next time.