Since January 2020, I have been playing a year-long game called the Feelings Collector with a friend of mine, Natalia. Natalia is a game maker and the Feelings Collector was a game that she had been playing on her own for a few years but decided to debut as a multi-player in 2020. The game is simple, but profound. You play by first asking yourself “what feeling do you want to have more of this year?” Then, you do a few exercises to answer that question and explore your current relationship to the feeling. Next you identify areas in your life where you might be able to find more of your chosen feeling. After this, you’re off on an open-ended adventure of self discovery.
In 2020, the game took the form of an email newsletter that Natalia sent about once every six weeks or so. In each email, Natalia shared her own journey with her chosen feeling and provided some exercises, prompts, and guidance to try out for the participants. The game can be played at any speed, at any time, and at any level of commitment you choose. At its core, the game is about learning how to tune into your inner compass, to honor your desires, and follow your intuitions. The Feelings Collector encourages its players to be receptive to the synchronicities that arise when attention is consciously directed toward a goal.
Think of it this way: when you learn a new language as an adult, in addition to the normal daily acquisition of vocabulary, there will come times when you encounter a word or phrase you had never heard or read before. The novelty of it grabs your attention—you think, wow!—what a beautiful, or strange, or funny, or troubling thing to say. Once you have learned it, however, you begin to see and hear that word everywhere and in the most unexpected places. In my own experience, these words are then quite difficult to forget. The Feelings Collector taps this property of consciousness and experience in a powerful and, as I have come to understand, potentially life-changing way.
My feeling in 2020 was “flow.” One of the leading scholars of flow defines it as the psychological state of optimum experience. I have found it easiest to explain by calling it the feeling of “being in the zone.” My motivation at the time for choosing flow emerged out of concerns about my work performance. I wasn’t doing what I felt was my best work, and I thought that if I could improve my ability to get into the zone better, I would see better results—not just in terms of overall output, but of quality as well.
The game worked as designed. This original purpose spilled over into nearly every domain of my life. Without getting into all the details, 2020 was a rough year. In addition to the pandemic, I’ve found myself at a career crossroads, and it will be a few months yet before I know how things are going to shake out. 2020 pushed me to my limits emotionally and otherwise. But playing the Feelings Collector was a real treat all throughout.
Inviting flow into my life for a year led to many different discoveries—insights and novelties of all sorts and the recuperation of long lost ideas and interests. Paramount among these was the outlines of a conceptual model that inspired my choice of feeling for 2021: creative.
Natalia is no longer running the Feelings Collector as an email newsletter—she has begun a new annual Personal Existential Game instead—but I’ve decided to keep playing through this blog. I have a lot to share about what I’ve already learned about creativity and the creative process and how I explore my relationship to the feeling “creative.” In part, I’ve decided to do this to practice writing, for my own self-actualization. But, perhaps more significantly, I think some of the things that I have learned about “flow” and “creative” while playing the Feelings Collector might be of use to others.
I suppose that remains to be seen. In the meantime, I’ve got 40 typed pages of notes to sift, a stack of books to annotate, and a folder of bookmarks to review.