Like jazz, life is a performing art. The liberated performance essential to artistic living is not about being on stage in front of critics; in particular, we do not fashion ourselves into objects for others’ pleasure. Thanks to the order established by the design phase of artistic living, liberated performance is not impulsive. And the heart of liberation is spiritual.
Freedom has two sides: freedom from and freedom to. Artistic living at its best is liberated from psychological hindrances; and it is free to engage wholeheartedly in the needed course of action. Artistic freedom is illustrated by a Swedish practice (a fartlek) used to train runners: they run not around a track, but at naturally varying velocities over hilly terrain, sprinting, charging up a hill, loping in a meadow. In general terms, this illustration suggests that when we intuit, feel, and follow in the movement of life, we let go of anxiety. The resulting freedom carries us beyond slavish engrossment in the desired goal.
And yet one kind important kind of peak experience of action, being in the zone, is not predicated on spiritual faith. This is an experience that the Creator has made available to everyone. Being in the zone has come to be known, thanks to the writing of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as “flow.” In the paradigm case, e.g., for an athlete or mountain climber, a person of high skill faces a high challenge, just at a level which calls forth one’s best. “The main dimensions of flow—intense involvement, deep concentration, clarity of goals and feedback, loss of a sense of time, lack of self-consciousness and transcendence of a sense of self, leading to an autotelic, that is, intrinsically rewarding experience—are recognized in more or less the same form by people the world over.” The goals are clear, so that the feedback one immediately receives enables one’s ongoing response to adjust to the continually updated situation. Referred to more commonly today as being “in the zone,” it is an experience of action free of stress.
It is to Csikszentmihaly’s credit that he envisages the possibility of an entire culture living continuously in flow. He writes:
Often what prompts the development of a civilization is not a change in objective conditions, but a conceptual reorganization that allows a group of people to recognize challenges where they did not see any before. . . . Such reconceptualizations, according to Toynbee, were the task of “creative minorities” within each culture. . . . The Occitan culture is . . . an example of that rare adaptation, a way of life that absorbs all the energies of its members in an enjoyable, fulfilling interaction. Work is just as enjoyable as leisure, and leisure is as meaningfully related to the rest of life as work is.
One person told me that the activity in which he experienced being in the zone was playing pinball. I wager that spirituality would indeed be required for flow to pervade the whole of life.
When have you experienced liberated and flowing action (whether or not it would fit the definition of “flow”)? Do you think that spirituality had anything to do with it?
Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, eds. Optimal experience: Psychological studies of flow in consciousness (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 365.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, eds. Optimal experience: Psychological studies of flow in consciousness (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 183, 185, 187.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Basketball.jpg
There was a time when I lived from weekend to weekend. It was a time when I dreaded going to work, especially at the beginning of the week, and could hardly wait until the end of the week. The leisure time that I had was not leisure time in the true sense of the word that it rejuvenated me. Instead I returned to work morally deflated, hung over and tired before I even began the day.
This was the time when I did not believe wholehearted in what I was doing. I was in conflict. This was definitely not “the flow.” I hated my job. It brought me no sense of satisfaction, no sense of a worthy purpose.
The “flow” began when I began working at something that I could do wholeheartedly. This does not imply that I became a workaholic, someone who used work as an end in and of itself, ignoring other important aspects of life. No I enjoyed the work, but also enjoyed the other aspects of life. During this time of work, time seemed to fly, and I was caught up in the joy of working where the sense of time vanished. Leisure time became a time of true regeneration, made all the sweeter by the knowledge that it was well earned. When the leisure time was completed, I looked forward to returning to my labor of love. I don’t want to imply that there were not challenges in the work, because they were, but these challenges were an intricate part of the work that made it so interesting and satisfying. Some of these challenges could no be completely overcome in the material sense. They were apart of the environment in which the work took place. I had to adapt and adjust to them. But the beauty of it all was that even though they were handicapping, they could not rob the satisfaction that is the result doing one’s best, and accepting that which was beyond the power to overcome.
Work made leisure time meaningful, and leisure time made work enjoyable. They complemented each other. In this “flow,” the subjective sense of time accelerated, and as I look back it seems as if the years took wings and flew. But I am left with all the meanings and the values accumulated during that period of active labor. Though being in “the flow” for an isolated activity does not require spirituality, the infusion of this “flow” into all aspects of life, this uniting of all the different aspects of life into “the flow” including the down sides of life as well as the upside of life does require spirituality.
Dr. Perry
Thank you again, Dr. Perry, for another glass of champagne from your life.
There was a time when I lived from weekend to weekend. It was a time when I dreaded going to work, especially at the beginning of the week, and could hardly wait until the end of the week. The leisure time that I had was not leisure time in the true sense of the word that it rejuvenated me. Instead I returned to work morally deflated, hung over and tired before I even began the day.
This was the time when I did not believe wholehearted in what I was doing. I was in conflict. This was definitely not “the flow.” I hated my job. It brought me no sense of satisfaction, no sense of a worthy purpose.
The “flow” began when I began working at something that I could do wholeheartedly. This does not imply that I became a workaholic, someone who used work as an end in and of itself, ignoring other important aspects of life. No I enjoyed the work, but also enjoyed the other aspects of life. During this time of work, time seemed to fly, and I was caught up in the joy of working where the sense of time vanished. Leisure time became a time of true regeneration, made all the sweeter by the knowledge that it was well earned. When the leisure time was completed, I looked forward to returning to my labor of love. I don’t want to imply that there were not challenges in the work, because they were, but these challenges were an intricate part of the work that made it so interesting and satisfying. Some of these challenges could no be completely overcome in the material sense. They were apart of the environment in which the work took place. I had to adapt and adjust to them. But the beauty of it all was that even though they were handicapping, they could not rob the satisfaction that is the result doing one’s best, and accepting that which was beyond the power to overcome.
Work made leisure time meaningful, and leisure time made work enjoyable. They complemented each other. In this “flow,” the subjective sense of time accelerated, and as I look back it seems as if the years took wings and flew. But I am left with all the meanings and the values accumulated during that period of active labor. Though being in “the flow” for an isolated activity does not require spirituality, the infusion of this “flow” into all aspects of life, this uniting of all the different aspects of life into “the flow” including the down sides of life as well as the upside of life does require spirituality.
Dr. Perry
Thank you again, Dr. Perry, for another glass of champagne from your life.