On Flow

It seems that I wasn't totally out to lunch in my earlier post concerning exercise. Since that time I was told about a psychological theory called "Flow," first developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Yes, that's a real name. No, I don't know how to pronounce it.

So apparently this guy has been interested in experiences exactly like those I was writing about, and has been studying them for 25 years. This theory is generally well-accepted in psychology, and basically tries to answer the question, "What makes people happy?" I will give you and excerpt from introduction to his book entitled Flow: The psychology of the optimal experience which I have just begun to read:

Yet we all have experienced times when...we do feel in control of our actions, master of our own fate. On the rare occasions that is happens, we feel a sense of exhiliration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.

This is what is meant by optimal experience. It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair, when the boat lunges through the waves like a colt - sails, hull, wind, and sea humming a harmony that vibrates in the sailor's veins. It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a mangnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape in front of the astonished creator. Or it is the feeling a father has when his child for the first time responds to his smile. Such events do not occur only when the external conditions are favorable, however: people who have survived concentration camps or who have lived through near-fatal physical dangers often recall that in the midst of their ordeal they experienced extraorinarily rich epiphanies in response to such simple events as hearing the song of a bird in the forest, completeing a hard task, or sharing a crust of bread with a friend.

Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times...the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish somthing difficult and worthwhile...

Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmer's muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue - yet these could have been the best moments of his life...

Yeah. So this book, perhaps, will be a more articulate expression of my feeling. In 250 pages.