Flow & oscillations
Summer's here and, frankly, I'm a bit all over the place—"creatively" speaking. I swing from multiple ideas vying for attention, to considering all of them complete and utter crap. The result: creeping paralysis on all fronts.
I'm making my way through a couple of books. I just finished Utopia for Realists, an interesting viewpoint on the nature of economic systems and our propensity to accept the status quo as immutable when, in fact, history points to profound societal changes as the ultimate constant. It barely took us a decade to reshape our entire existence around digital devices, and now we're doing it all over again, even faster, with AI.
And yet: we can't solve poverty? Or figure out rules that don't just pick a handful of people to reward over a billion? What if we shifted incentives back to building, instead of toxic growth and the extraction of wealth? What if we focused our resources and energy to the actual betterment of humankind, as opposed to inventing endless ways of gaming our species' brains towards consumption?
If we allowed ourselves to look beyond dogma, and to imagine, again...man, the things we could do.
...
Another book I'm reading, on and off, is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's seminal work, Flow. After years of constantly coming across the concept, it's nice to finally “hear” about it straight from the horse’s mouth. Flow presents the science and research behind the author's breakthrough insight: the very human and universal experience of losing all sense of time and place during certain activities. The moments we typically refer to as being in the zone. These can be triggered by work, or leisure; by sports, writing, music, reading, cooking...photography, of course. Anything that requires focus and involves skills equal to, or slightly beyond, our capabilities:
When all a person's relevant skills are needed to cope with the challenges of a situation, that person's attention is completely absorbed by the activity. ... [P]eople become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing. ... This is one reason why flow improves the quality of experience: the clearly structured demands of the activity impose order, and exclude the interference of disorder in consciousness.
Absorption. Excluding "the interference of disorder". Indeed.
I've had the great fortune of experiencing flow states regularly, for most of my life. Enough that I'm probably addicted on some level, which would explain the mild panics during quieter periods. But there's an edge to it, a question that always looms in those intervals: was that my last fix? Is the well finally dry? I think it can be, if we let it. Csikszentmihalyi's studies reveal a need to flirt with the boundaries of our skills, just enough to keep ourselves engaged and avoid switching to automatic. But that's the challenge isn't it? Finding a path to the next level without necessarily veering off course. Or perhaps that's where the answer lies: new ground, no maps. Why limit ourselves to what we already know when there's so much to discover and experience? Why lock ourselves into roles and personas? I think we might be meant to oscillate between multiple points. To leave areas fallow as we dig other fields, and then to return and begin again.
Flow and oscillations. Movement.
I'm attaching a song to this post—still not done…I think…but close. It's the first "new" Jade Leary material I've written in years, and the reason I'm using quotes is because the source is an old draft I recorded in 2012. It's an interesting exercise, to breathe contemporary words and chords into riffs from another era, picking up a conversation started fourteen years prior, melding two voices into one. Flow? Yes, most definitely.
I'm a little nervous to share it but here goes:
One last thing: if you're in the midst of the current European heat wave, do take good care of yourself. This is no game. We’re getting hit this week but not as bad, and just for a few days (well, fingers crossed).
Oh and to my Canadian compatriots: Happy Canada Day :)
Later.
