Dear W,
Thank you for your letter. I could relate to your last letter; if I could boil flow state down to a recipe I would; I am glad to hear table tennis have been in source of flow for you. I unfortunately, haven’t managed to find many yet in my day to day life. I look for it in video games, when I am writing, when I am trying to program, when I am running, or doing yoga. I come close, but then it becomes a distant memory of a flow state that I once achieved. The earliest memory of being in flow state I have, was before I knew the word flow state. For me, flow is too few and far between. And the problem with looking for flow, is that you don’t find flow just by looking for it, it finds you. You spend a currency in hoping that you might end up in a flow state.
There are two ways “gamble” for flow. One is effort, another is sustained attention.
Effort
Effort is hard to come by without motivation. And if you are looking for motivation, you probably don’t have it. And these days, it’s in particularly low on supply; I think you might agree; I feel you used to term “languishing” to somewhat describe it.
I think there are two distinct problem with looking for motivation. One, I believe is physiological. Our brain’s reward centres are so incredibly trivial to activate these days; that it is much more likely that our reward centres are depleted after each sleep cycle quickly before it can be useful1; if it turns into an addiction, it’s a vicious cycle.
Secondly, it is the notion of motivation. One bit of advice that I wish I had gotten when I was younger is that motivation is not as real as we make it to be. Motivation is, either a reflection of ego or driven by a potential reward, or both. Both are subject to shift with circumstances. If you remember the days when we were just starting out as professionals, our motivation to learn and progress were driven by sheer ego, a potential reward of more; don’t get me wrong, learning is rewarding. But it also meant, our motivations were bound to our desires associated to our career. That went away slowly as we became somewhat established in our careers; our ego went elsewhere, so to speak. Motivation is a fickle thing. And without motivation, good effort is almost impossible. Whatever motivation we manage to scrounge up from our lives, fizzles away rather quickly in our fragmented lives2, specially in a world where our attention is something that is to be sold to the highest bidder.
Sustained attention
in other words, habit
I like to think I have learned a thing to two about long distances & endurance. The key to going long distances is not headstrong motivation, but habit3. The secret to flow, is habit. Table tennis is poetry to you because your habit of playing turned it into poetry. Anything that is given sustained attention will turn into a habit, which in turn will bloom into poetry among other things.
On my long distance trip, the best days were not days when I was motivated to go extra long distances, but the days where I just wanted to ride my bike. At some point riding the bike became such a habit, that it made me sad to get on any other mode of transport; I barely even stopped after I got going for the day. And when the mundanity of riding became a habit, I started noticing the poetry in long distance riding. The body feels like an engine, that keeps flowing and keeping it running becomes a game. An apple is 20 kilometres or so; a protein bar is maybe a little more.
I think flow is almost always borne out something that has become a habit.
Making the last bit of math easier
Sustained attention is to pay with time, essentially; split into many many tiny slices, over days, months, years. It doesn’t necessarily matter how long it sustains, but one can pay to have a chance to experience flow, in tiny bits over months and years.
I often used to hear, and also used to say the words myself; there is not enough time for me. But I find that statement somewhat pointless. “There is not enough time for me”, if the statement is true, it is the same thing as saying there is not have enough money for the things I want. If we don’t have enough money to purchase something, we just do not purchase that thing. The key difference here is time can not be loaned out like money against a future promise. But what we can do is keep paying little bits of time that we can afford to pay out, and maybe that gamble would end up as poetry someday.
See you tomorrow.
Best, A
https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2021/10/addictive-potential-of-social-media-explained.html
Forcing oneself to stay motivated likely results in something akin to burnout.
And plenty of rest.