To make a creative change in the quality of experience, it might be
useful to experiment with one's surroundings as well. Outings and
vacations help to clear the mind, to change perspectives, to look at
one's situation with a fresh eye. Taking charge of one's home or office
environment--throwing out the excess, redecorating to one's taste, making
it personally and psychologically comfortable--could be the first step in
reordering one's life.
With time of day as with the other parameters of life, it is
important to find out what rhythms are the most congenial to you
personally. There is no day or hour that is best for everyone.
Experimenting with various alternatives--getting up earlier, taking a nap
in the afternoon, eating at different times--helps one to find the best
set of options.
Many people will say that this advice is useless to them, because
they already have so many demands on their time that they absolutely
cannot afford to do anything new or interesting. But more often than not,
time stress is an excuse for not taking control of one's life. As the
historian E. P. Thompson noted, even in the most oppressive decades of
the Industrial Revolution, when workers slaved away for more than 80
hours a week, some spent their few precious free hours engaging in
literary pursuits or political action instead of following the majority
into the pubs. Likewise, we don't have to let time run through our
fingers. How many of our demands could be reduced if we put some energy
into prioritizing, organizing, and streamlining the routines that now
fritter away our attention? One must learn to husband time carefully, in
order to enjoy life in the here and now.
FINDING A GOAL
Flow is a source of mental energy in that it focuses attention and
motivates action. Like other forms of energy, it can be used for
constructive or destructive purposes. Teenagers arrested for vandalism or
robbery often have no other motivation than the excitement they
experience stealing a car or breaking into a house. War veterans say that
they never felt such intense flow as when they were behind a machine gun
on the front lines. Thus, it is not enough to strive for enjoyable goals,
but one must also choose goals that will reduce the sum total of entropy
in the world.
How can we find a goal that will allow us to enjoy life while being
responsible to others? Buddhists advise us to "act always as if the
future of the universe depended on what you did, while laughing at
yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference." This
serious playfulness makes it possible to be both engaged and carefree at
the same time. We may also discover the foundations on which to build a
good life from the knowledge scientists are slowly accumulating. The
findings of science makes us increasingly aware of how unique each person
is. Not only in the way the ingredients of the genetic code have been
combined, but also in the time and place in which an organism encounters
life. Thus each of us is responsible for one particular point in space
and time in which our body and mind forms a link within the total network
of existence. We can focus consciousness on the tasks of everyday life in
the knowledge that when we act in the fullness of the flow experience, we
are also building a bridge to the future of the universe.
From Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Copyright 1997 by
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Reprinted by arrangement with BasicBooks, a
division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
ILLUSTRATION
Tags:
blissful state,
business deal,
ecstasy,
effortless action,
everyday life,
external circumstances,
flow,
flow experiences,
full attention,
good friend,
happiness,
immersion,
interaction,
lucid account,
mystics,
rapture,
skis,
slope,
Social Interaction,
success,
warm sunshine,
work
