flow

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow is of an experience which occurs facing perceived challenges that stretch (neither overmatch or underutilize) skills, with clear, proximal goals and immediate feedback about the progress being made.

My Saturday morning flow fix.  Rosie the Rockfish, Version 1.0

In flow, experience seamlessly unfolds from moment to moment, and one enters a subjective state with the following characteristics:

- merging of action and awareness

- loss of reflective self-consciousness

- a sense that one can control one’s actions (can deal with the situation because one knows how to respond to whatever happens next)

- distortion of temporal experience
- experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, such that often the end goal is just an excuse for the process

Last week marked the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed the homes of my grandparents, 2 of my aunts and their families.  

890 Second Street, the property where my grandparents raised 9 kids

An excerpt from my Aunt’s blog -- she describes her childhood on Second Street in Gulfport, Mississippi, where my grandparents raised 9 children.  Granny and Uncle Dick lived directly across, abutting the beach.

In 1956 our house was a three bedroom, one bath house. I vaguely remember at some point my older brother sleeping on the screened in front porch. Too many bodies, not enough beds.

...

When I was little there was many a summer day that Granny and Uncle Dick would have ice-cold watermelon sliced and ready for us to eat on our way home from swimming and playing or fishing and crabbing on the beach. There was a concrete table and concrete benches under a shady oak tree in her yard. We had to wash the salt water off our little bodies under the hose in our backyard anyway, so messy eating was the norm when devouring the sweet melon. 

Granny’s usual attire was a cotton housedress with a starched linen apron. On her feet she wore soft house shoes. She stepped softly.  She spoke softly. And she served the most wonderful breakfast you ever ate. Uncle Dick traveled fairly frequently and when he did one of us children was appointed the duty of spending the night with Granny. She didn’t like to be alone in her house at night. It was a treat and the reason was her breakfast and because she had milk that came in the carton. (At our house we drank powdered milk that my mother mixed up.) Not only did she have milk in the carton she also had, sent straight from heaven, chocolate milk in the carton.

After Katrina, chainsaw artists sculpted dead trees.  This one is in my Nana's hometown of Bay St. Louis.  It is called the "Angel Tree;" 3 people clung to it to save their lives during the storm: http://jacksonville.com/sports/outdoorsoutside/2014-08-30/story/angel-tree-mississippi-gulf-coast-saved-3-lives-during

The motivation to persist in or return to the activity arises out of the experience itself.  The flow experience is thus a force for expansion in relation to the individual’s goal and interest structure.  What happens at any moment is responsive to what happened immediately before.  The unfolding flow experience is shaped by both the person and the environment.

Rosie, Version 2.0
Post-tattoo removal, before she possibly flows
onto the wall of my parents' home

Intense concentration, perhaps the defining quality of flow, is just another way of saying that attention is wholly invested in the present exchange. 

Nana - 1 week 'til 95!

*text regarding "flow" from Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi