Photo taken in Liechtenstein
Blending Into One
There’s nothing like it. The bizarre thing is, you only realize it when it’s over.
You can’t plan for it. You can’t force it. It’s just one of those things that happens to you.
Like a current in a channel, it can feel as if you are being pulled deep within an energetic force. You suddenly gain an impressive level of focus, one you never knew was possible.
Momentum builds the longer you allow yourself to be fully immersed in the activity. While you always have the option to take a break, something about this sudden expansive concentration keeps you going.
Where does this newfound intrinsic motivation come from? Is it curiosity? Wonder? Excitement? These long bursts of productivity cause you to lose track of time and forget yourself in a function.
Actor and action blend into one, so much so that you can hardly tell the difference between being and doing. In these rare moments, both appear to be happening at the same time.
One might even ask: Are you the one making something? Or is it possible the project you’re working on is actually making you? What is really being created in a moment?
Is it just the things we put together that give us a sense of purpose? Or is something more meaningful occurring as a result of our creativity? In creating, are we also creating ourselves?
Maybe there’s more happening beyond what we see, especially amid a meditative state of flow. In psychology, flow is described as a state of mind in which a person becomes fully absorbed in an activity.
While we reach this frequency in different ways, the idea is that total enjoyment takes over. All of your attention is consumed by what you’re doing—a heightened state of creativity giving you a prolonged state of focus you never knew was possible.
In the Zone
One of the things I love about experiencing flow is that your typical stream of thought stops. For however long it lasts, the visual noise resembling background static fades into a hum of silence.
Whether I’m deeply involved in writing ideas, editing photos, or playing the piano, it feels like a break from the constant day-to-day planning of life. These activities might not involve sitting in a dark room, watching thoughts in silence, but the very experience of flow can serve as a form of meditation.
When fully present with what you are working on, any concern for the self disappears. Time feels altered, especially when you check the clock and realize how much has passed.
It can feel wonderful, transcending time—the very thing we tend to keep an eye on several times a day. Maybe what makes it feel so special is that on such occasions, we realize what we are giving our energy to, not the limits of everyday structures but the substance, the very content that fills it.
For whatever reason, something other than our mundane vices and worries matters a great deal to us—so much so that it’s not easy to resist the special sense of being in the zone. Eyes fully locked with a kind of focus that gives off energy—this must be what it feels like to have a genuine purpose.
Rather than absorbing things passively throughout the day, a greater, more active force keeps us engaged. In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes:
“The best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times – although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person, there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves.”
Fragmented Mind
One of the most important conditions for the flow experience is that it requires dedication to exploring depth—the essence of what makes up the special activity you are working on. But depth takes time.
It takes time to allow concentration and curiosity to guide us to nuance and alternate approaches. It takes time to create the kind of space and effort that leads to breakthrough insights and discoveries.
The problem is that carving out this kind of deliberate practice is not easy amid the many distractions designed to steal our focus. With so many apps, platforms, screens, and devices competing for our attention, the struggle to protect motivation toward the creative process is very real.
It’s especially hard when the very tools we use every day are designed to keep us reliant and addicted the more we use them. Over time, this can cause any one of us to develop a fragmented mind.
This happens when you lose the ability to place all of your mental energy on one activity, constantly shifting your focus and multitasking to the point that doing anything for a prolonged period seems impossible. In many ways, fragmentation is the opposite of flow.
While fragmentation leaves you struggling with efficiency, flow enables you to reach the heart of the matter—the very depth of worthwhile work that helps you connect and explore ideas further, making room for new possibilities to emerge.
In Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, Johann Hari writes:
“‘There’s this thing about speed that feels great… part of why we feel absorbed in this is that it’s awesome, right? You get to feel that you are connected to the whole world, and you feel that anything that happens on the topic, you can find out and learn about it.’ But we told ourselves we could have a massive expansion in the amount of information we are exposed to, and the speed at which it hits us, with no costs. This is a delusion: ‘It becomes more exhausting.’ More importantly, Sune said, ‘Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there’s no time to reach depth.”
Taking Back Our Focus
In retrospect, it makes sense why flow experiences leave us feeling genuinely content and satisfied. These are the moments in which we are fully in control of our faculties and creative abilities.
However frequent or rare, these occasions allow us to fully stand in our freedom and autonomy. Whether we reach flow through crafting, painting, running, cooking, or more, part of the reason it happens is intention.
We intend to give our full attention to certain things, especially when they inspire us from the start. In such moments, we are creating instead of consuming.
We are taking back our focus to do something useful with it. Rather than staring blankly at a screen, we deliberately commit to the very thing that makes us feel alive.
Creativity gives us energy throughout our lives. We are wired to activate this innate ability and make a difference with it, no matter how big or small.
Even if it means a simple shift in mood or engagement, it’s a useful tool available to us in every situation. In using it, we open up the possibility of reaching the flow state—a unique sensation we can reach more often as we learn to appreciate the genuine things that motivate us.
In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink writes:
“When we enter the world, are we wired to be passive or inert? Or are we wired to be active and engaged? I’m convinced that it’s the latter – that our basic nature is to be curious and self-directed. And I say that not because I’m a dewy-eyed idealist, but because I’ve been around young children and because my wife and I have three kids of our own. Have you ever seen a six-month-old or a one-year-old who’s not curious or self-directed? I haven’t. That’s how we are out of the box. If, at age fourteen or forty-three, we’re passive and inert, that’s not because it’s our nature. It’s because something flipped our default setting.”
Beautiful Middle
Flow is a wonderful byproduct of creativity, a state that requires dedicating our beloved activities and passion projects to distinct periods within our busy schedules. In doing so, we have a greater chance of overriding distractions and the limits caused by a fragmented mind.
We rise above these challenges when we confront the ultimate dilemma of today’s common social behavior—to seek or to give attention. While many struggle to resist the social incentive of collecting fake validation from others, some refuse to lose the urge to win back focus by giving attention to what matters.
It’s the difference between reading a book for pleasure versus scanning quickly to get it over with, between feeling the emotional beats of a movie versus watching it in the background with your phone glowing in your hands. It’s the difference between living your day with boredom and mindlessness versus one filled with meaning and purpose.
Regardless of how we are doing in this, the undeniable truth is that we always have a choice. Moment to moment, we get to choose how we want it to be—an empowering act because it means creating a life as opposed to merely meandering through it.
Ultimately, at times we do succeed, flow takes over with increasing frequency, enabling us to savor all that is possible within a beginning and an end, enough to find wonder in the beautiful middle; the space beyond time that we could either rush through or enjoy with a breathtaking glimpse of infinity.
