"Paradoxically, when people try to be in the flow, they often find that the flow state eludes them more. This can make the flow state seem even more tenuous, rare, and difficult to achieve." — Way of Now
We can go at it from more the level of a recipe. I've certainly tried that. Like, hmm — I'm going to just really concentrate on my present-moment experience, because that's what mindfulness is, and because I can only live in this moment, and that makes sense, and I wanna live each day like it's my last. And for anyone who's sincerely gone at that — I don't know, you might already begin to feel a little exhausted. It's just a pretty, pretty exhausting way to go about life. It would be like listening to a song where you kind of narrow-focus on each note or each chord, rather than the more all-together feel of it — which includes our present-moment experience: the now of listening to our melody includes the past, includes the future.
And you see this in some other recipes as well — for engaging in activities — that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow, presents. You know, those kinds of activities that completely engross you — for example, climbing. You cannot bring all of your life dramas into that. So you're just kind of — your world becomes that activity. And yes, if I'm rock climbing, or surfing a wave, or playing chess, or whatever it might be — there is that, yes: to do that action, I need to remember all the experiences that are informing my current action; I'm also planning where, if I go like this, where it's going to go — but it happens without that heavy hand of sense of separation from the present moment, from the now. But then those feel like isolated experiences. And not every one of us is going to spend our lives more in those kinds of activities. Maybe we are interested more in an everyday, ordinary life experience. But still interested in this experience of flow.
So is there a way to less feel like we need to kind of squeeze, or kind of orchestrate, our experiences, to live more with that feeling of being in the flow?
We can talk about this in terms of the flow state, and also talk about it in terms of the meditation states. Nothing like trying to get into the meditative state you were in before — how'd that work out? And even — perhaps more subtle, but, since we're on these kinds of journeys, perhaps even quite deeply relevant to us — is that way we can, not in terms of survival, but in terms of maybe some kind of spiritual attainment, still have that picture of: there's an I at the present, and then there's going to be this I in the future — that's going to be the calmer, the better, the more accepting, the more loving, the happier, maybe even enlightened version of the I. It's both wonderful and terrifying to see how we can take the same template — for survival and self-preservation, and what we're geared towards as human beings — and apply that same template to "achieving flow."
I'm going to connect this back to Csikszentmihalyi's "autotelic," where telos is a goal. Self-goal. Though it usually points towards activities that can be intrinsically enjoyed, just for the doing of it, not for the end result. And then, when I think about most of ordinary experience — there's actually quite a lot that's not so inherently enjoyable. And that pressure to kind of try and squeeze out the present-moment enjoyment, in one thing or another, to live in the moment that way — I feel it personally as another kind of level of trying.
But what if autotelic is, in a way, just the description of nowflow reality? Because there is nothing spread out, smeared out, in time, in a dimension of time. There's nothing else. Everything we need is in the nowflow, unfolding all together.
We're never going to encounter an effect from the past that's not already encompassed by nowflow. We're never going to encounter a future other than a nowflow. And so, if that's all there is — if this time, as Dogen says, swallows up and spits out the time of the splendid Vermilion Palace, the time of arrival, the time of attaining the goal, whatever that Vermilion Palace means for us — then autotelic is not something we have to try and construe, but it's actually a more apt description of where goals lie, and where meaning lies. Where it's never separate. Just this unfolding, all together. And for me, right now, that is… so supportive.
No Time, No Problem?
An Honest Look at “Timelessness” in Physics and Living
What if there’s no time—and that’s not a problem for physics? What if there’s no time—could that be a solution for our suffering?
Rather than offering answers of what to think, this series offers ways of thinking that can move us past the pressures we put on ourselves: from the “should” of trying to “be present” to the “should” of being 4D spacetime worms to be compatible with relativity! Somewhere between those “shoulds,” I got stuck until physicist and Tai Chi Master Wonchull Park showed me how to think about nature simply, livably. Each session includes an hour-long meditation practice, where we get to try on different conceptions and perceptions of time to discover how equivalently valid options that physics provides can impact our levels of illusion and freedom. We’ll be reading together from a few sources—such as Wonchull Park’s Essential Reality & Time, Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji—to deeply question the role(s) of time in our lives. Looking forward to our discoveries.
Thank you for Being with Being.
beingwithbeing.org
mackenziehawkins.substack.com
