Flow and the feeling of being in the moment -
You know that moment when you sit in a chair and read a book for a while, the light changes and the wind whips the trees against the window of your room. You however stay transfixed by the object in front of you. Flow is an interesting concept - apparently it is the space in which action and awareness merge and is a sign of the mind being ultra focussed.
I have been thinking about this concept over the last couple of days and it seems like an interesting space to inhabit. Flow theory was first introduced by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, he describes it as like playing jazz. You can ceck out his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
"being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."
Looking at that quote I can begin to see times that I may be in flow. The most interesting flow for me is playing music. It just clicks and the world falls away - I know we are entering flow because John the bassist will generally turn the lights off and we just play - that is a nice feeling, being lost in sound. But I personally don't think flow exists just for the producers.
A lot of the characteristics of flow
- Concentrating and focus
- A loss of the feeling of self consciousness
- Distorted sense of time
- action awareness merging
Flow for me appears to have two sides - On one we have the producers, the creators and the doers and on the other we have the consumers, absorbers and the fascinated. Still thinking
In a way time is relative to the level of engagement and engagement is relative to the level of interestingness. Does concentration speed up or slow down our experience of time? I know this is probably all cod. I had it kicking around in my head and just wanted to write it down.
I guess we are speeding it up to slow it down - I guess we can just get into this flow....jazz!









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