The Flow State

I'm writing here with sad cello 10 hours playing - it is a little bit Murder She Wrote and a little bit quirky writer.  Cello is just sad.

I went out with a girl who played cello -  for the winter of a year while I was at university.  She also played the full sized harp. She was privileged and intense and was fresh from boarding school in the mountains in New Zealand.

But I got drunk, blacked out and crashed her car and I remember her father looking at me and just shaking his head - "Don't worry about it, eh?" - me sheepish and totally humiliated with torn jeans and a deep hangover.

She last saw me, years later, I was crossing the road outside a pub - older, a dropout and lost to drinking - she was rosy cheeked, and all corporate and touched my arm near the elbow - "But Bren, is everything going OK?"

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On the weekend I ran 20.3 kilometres without stopping.  Planned it for a week.  Dedicated to going.  Woke after 5am and even though it was light rain - I dressed and headed out.

Running is a new delicious activity for me.  Once I am over the first five or ten minutes, my body warms and relaxes into the rhythm and I can truly get into a flow moment.

I have a set path and I follow it along the coast - along beautiful tourist trail for 10.2 km and then, at the half way point, which is a rocky break wall separating the harbour from the beach, I turn and head back for home.  20.4km - half a marathon - non stop.

Focus, Flexibility and Discipline.

Three words that have helped me cover 40kms a week for the last 18 months.  The words chose me in a way.  They are my main character flaws - lack of focus, being inflexible, and lacking discipline.  So I exercise with those words and roll them in my mouth and meditate on their power and meaning as I breathe and pace along the path.

When my mind wanders, I snap back to Focus, Flexibility and Discipline, or - running up a hill, it might morph to Focus, Flexibility and Just-hold-on - there is something about that too.

Now I have done my first half marathon distance - I have entered an official race for next month.  I need photos and some bits of paper to verify it.

I wrote down at the beginning of the year that I would like to do some things for the next decade - like staying sober for 10 years, like doing yoga 4x a week for 10 years, and running a marathon each year for the next ten years.

I thought they were private, never-see-the-light-of-day goals, but here I am actually working on them in just six months.  Amazing.  But nowhere near ticked yet - plenty of miles to put into my legs and downward dogs before that happens...

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A big part of my life these past months has been the idea of flow.  My attention was drawn to flow through my yoga teacher, who moves us through a series of poses in a flow fashion.  This way we get the body moving with the breath and experience the edge as we move through a range of postures.  But flow has other meanings too, I discovered.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a wonderful, sumptuous name for an author and his book - Flow, the Psychology of Optimal Experience - reveals how the flow state is key to understanding happiness and living meaningfully.  (Wow - that sentence has eight or so nine letter words - thank you mr morning coffee!)


He writes that being in the flow state is when people truly experience that sense of timelessness and deep engagement that comes form being connected and absorbed in what you are doing.

From playing a musical instrument, to doing yoga, to wood turning - people can arrive in a flow state through any number of paths - but it is the flow state itself that is of such power and value.

Being able to completely lose yourself and feel that deep attachment to what you are doing ins where your mind and body act as one and everything else seems to fall away.  A sort of timelessness ensues and you can literally keep going and lose all sense of time itself.

This is what I'm talking about!  Instead of the cheap fix of drugs, or alcohol or the nervous rush of gambling - how about that deep sense of meaning and feeling at one when you are crafting or writing or playing?  That feeling of satisfaction and of just being when you are doing your flow activity can be intensely revealing.

The author goes onto relate how intentions - which I touched on in an earlier blogpost about setting intentions - is an expression of meaning.   He writes "In this sense the answer to the old riddle "What is the meaning of life?" turns out to be astonishingly simple.  The meaning of life is meaning: whatever it is, wherever it comes from, a unified purpose is what gives meaning to life." p217

The best thing in life is where you can do an activity that is meaningful to you and transform it  into a flow state.  So finding your flow is the way to go.

I feel I approach the flow state, (although it is an elusive never-quite-there-feeling) when I practice yoga - or in the middle stages of a long run - or when I can write uninterrupted.

As an alcoholic, I confused the drunken torpor with a flow state, and just as ambitiously pursued drinking to the point of exhaustion.

Flow - easy to read, a classic - published in 1990 - and just brilliant.