Flow is the antidote
“Flow is an antidote to transactional reality.” – Dave Evans, on Hidden Brain with Shankar Vedantam
(Note: This post qualifies as a “long read,” so take your time.)
I call myself a writer, but in practice, my medium is the simple state of flow.
Flow focuses on task, not outcome. Flow draws me into a sensory experience, a somatic experience that links mind and body and spirit seemingly effortlessly—how? In flow, I am wide open to the world around me, as if “I” were not bound by my edges, but a drop in an ocean.
Last week, I was mainlining episodes of Hidden Brain, the podcast by Shankar Vendantum that focuses on social science, psychology and communication. Recent episodes have been dovetailing with my interest in spiritual care. (I’m returning to school in September to start an MA in Theology, with a focus on Spiritual Care and Psychotherapy.) I’ve been jotting down notes, transcribing, and reflecting on the skills developed during thirty years, or more, of practicing the craft of writing, specifically creative writing, writing in pursuit of beauty, writing to illuminate some meaning that’s just out of reach, writing to sink into mystery.
“Flow is the experience of full and deep engagement, where time stands still.” – Dave Evans, again
From practice, I know—a simple flow state is ever-available, it is always here to step into, just waiting for me to arrive. Like a river, the flow runs alongside the distracted, anxious, needy experiences that riddle my life (aka being human!), and this river is here for me to swim in, drink from, dip my toe into, stare at, always available, so long as I am available, too.
I am not talking about heightened experiences of flow, about the “apex” flow experience. I am talking about simple flow. (Thanks for naming that distinction, Dave Evans.)
“Flow can occur when you’re operating in the flow channel. The flow channel [aka river?] is a place of experience where the task you are currently involved in and your skills to perform that task are in approximate balance. You’re neither over-talented, so you’re bored, nor under-talented, so you’re anxious and nervous you might fail. You’re right at the edge of your capability, which means this task is demanding your full attention.” – Dave Evans (and, here, he cited the work of Mihaly Csikszenmihalyi; see below)
I have been trying to find a name for a skill that seems to come easily, for me. I’ve called it, at times, “creating a welcoming space,” and it’s a skill that I’ve applied in different areas of my life, from running a workshop, to coaching soccer, to reading to kids, to hosting a party. Sometimes this skill gets called “leadership,” but that’s not quite accurate. It’s a directional skill that is also about ceding control. Essentially, I have become skilled, through practice, at ushering not just myself, but others, too, into simple flow moments. In these moments, we are in a flow channel—my river, their rivers, our river—and our collective capacity meets the collective task, so we neither feel anxious that we won’t be able to do the thing and also are engaged and present.
Basically, it’s directing attention toward a particular task that brings us in concert: into the same space, the same moment, so that we are part of a shared experience, which may be delightful, reflective, comforting, challenging, fun, but most importantly, is as spacious and as focused as possible.
“Each person allocates his or her limited attention either by focusing it intentionally like a beam of energy, or by diffusing it in desultory, random movements. The shape and content of life depend on how attention has been used.” – from Flow, by Mihaly Csikszenmihalyi
In practice, “directing attention toward a particular task that brings us in concert” (I need a better phrase for this) requires a certain amount of design, while leaving space for the unknown. Elements that can be considered in advance include: the removal of barriers or friction, an understanding of constraints, and a clear articulation of the goal and the tasks that give structure to the process. That sounds super-vague, and maybe I should be inserting an example here, but the details and context really make a difference in appropriate design; I tend to boil my design down to the simplest and clearest options for communication purposes, with the fewest foreseeable barriers to participation. The limitations and practicality of my design become clarifying only when the experience is rolling. I can see what’s working, and what’s not. I can make changes as needed—though preferably not in a reactionary way; I have to be comfortable with discomfort—my own and others’. Afterward, I may suffer from doubt, need to debrief, and seek to learn from the experience and tweak my design; but in the moment, and this is pretty much no matter how the task is unrolling, I experience a spaciousness and calm that feels freeing.
I am fully inhabiting my self and I am not bound by my self.
I think others feel it too, at least some of the time. And I think that’s all that’s happening—I am in the flow, and others are there with me too.
I’ve begun reading “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and I’m reflecting on the concepts of “differentiation” and “integration,” which on first glance appear oppositional. How can I be both unique and connected at once? (It’s a big Life question for me—how to be an artist, which requires ridiculous amounts of time and energy focused on the particularities of a craft, while also being an attentive and connected parent, partner, friend, daughter, sister, etc.).
To be confident within my expression of self while feeling connected across barriers and boundaries—in communion with other people, ideas, art, nature. That’s flow.
Being myself fully and being fully myself with others—this is kind of the ultimate joy in life, isn’t it?
“This simple truth—that the control of consciousness determines the quality of life—has been known for a long time; in fact, for as long as human records exist.” – from Flow, by Mihaly Csikszenmihalyi
You don’t have to make art to be in a flow state. What’s required is your attention. Attention is always possible, but not always available. Practice helps. Mindfulness is a starting point, meditation is good practice, but so is holding an infant and pairing your breath with theirs, so is sitting with a child who is sounding out letters on the page, so is getting up early to move your body, so is dancing, singing, walking with a friend and listening closely and learning to ask good questions, or watching the birds in your backyard till you feel like you know each one. The more you practice steering your attention toward what matters to you, the easier it becomes to inhabit liminality, to step from here to there, into the flow.
It’s so wonderful, it’s a wonderful state to inhabit, but there are so many distractions, our attention is constantly being pulled, and we only have so much to give.
How much control do we have over where our attention goes?
“With consciousness, we can deliberately weigh what the senses tell us, and respond accordingly. … Power returns to the person when rewards are no longer relegated to outside forces…. The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. ” – from Flow, by Mihaly Csikszenmihalyi
Where are your inner resources? I used to say this to my kids when they were small, and bored, needy, fighting, rolling on the floor. How I wanted them to have inner resources to pull from—imagination, creativity, curiosity, resilience, playfulness of spirit. (And I think they did, and they do!) How I want that for everyone, actually, myself included. And it’s not always possible, and that’s hard sometimes. There are times when external events knock me to my knees, and my attention fades, my “psychic energy” is poured into attempting to solve the insoluble, I become confused by ugly emotions, by grief and loss and self-doubt and pain.
And then … I need reminders, I need well-worn paths that lead down to the river, or even just get me close enough to hear the water rushing past, to trust that it’s still there. I need to give myself over. Maybe it’s a kind word from a wise friend at the right moment. Often I find entry into the simple flow most easily through my body—breathing; walking; stretching; sweating at the gym. Get me out of my bicycle, and suddenly I am more alive, more open to what’s flowing.
My discipline is writing. My practice is flow.
xo, Carrie
Famous love story
During the earlier years of my writing career, all life experiences were filed under “material” for future writing projects. This mindset helped me endure difficult times, and even the drudgery of caring for small children (which goes hand-in-hand with the joy) could be made to feel useful, as if I were collecting scraps that could one day be turned into a delicious writer’s stew.
A few years ago, during the pandemic, I recognized that all of my writing was therapeutic, including the literary writing I’d been calling my career and vocation. I did not like this idea at all. I rebelled and revolted against it, maybe because it felt exploitative, even of my own experiences (let alone everyone else with whom I am in relationship).
Lately, I’ve been feeling at peace with this discovery—that my writing is therapeutic, that I’ve practiced it with devotion out of necessity, as much as discipline. My writing has kept my head above water, while also giving me a sense of purpose and hope during dull or aimless or desperate periods of my life. Writing soothes and comforts me. Writing fiction has deepened my capacity for empathy, sharpened my curiosity to learn how others see and frame the world. Writing is a magnetic force that pulls me in its direction; yet writing has never quite become the organizing principle around which I can structure, to satisfaction, my energies and priorities. Is writing my reason for being? My purpose and calling? Or is it the practice that sustains my purpose and calling?
My life is structured around relationships. Connection is my organizing principle. I am a quiet interior person, yet I thrive on sharing experiences with others.
I recently did a time audit, tracking the minutiae of my activities throughout a week (valuable, because so much of my time is “unstructured,” at present). First, I noticed that I spend a lot of time being with others, focusing on the needs of others (and that this brings meaning to my days). The flip-side is that I spend a lot of time in self-oriented activities—going to the gym, writing and journaling, quiet time alone, walks with friends. Focus on self; focus on others. Fill the cup; pour it out. Experience; process the experience. Action; reflection. Sometimes there is overlap between these circles—for example, biking on an errand feeds my spirit while the errand may benefit someone else; a walk with a friend can be both an experience and a processing of experiences.
One more observation: I spend very little time “working,” when work is defined as as an exchange of one’s time and skills for commensurate financial gain in the form of salary or paycheque, benefits, pension, etc. When someone asks “What do you do?” they generally mean “What do you do for a living?” And for this, my time audit showed very clearly, I have no good answer. I’ve been writing poems all spring; does that count? I also spend a lot of time looking after my dad right now, trying to understand his needs as they change, keeping my siblings and wider family in the loop, connected, feeling togetherness, mutually supported. Is this work? It’s just life, isn’t it?
When my kids were little, I stayed home to look after them for close to a decade (while trying to find time to write). This was a hard time, in many ways, for many of the same reasons that now is a hard time, in my life. “What do you do?” I’m a writer, I would have said then; or not, depending on how confident I felt in that identity on a given day or hour.
Twenty years ago, I was writing poems too.
They’re in a stack of books and projects beside me now—a manuscript titled “Famous Love Story,” which was never published in full, and did not earn me a living, though it probably kept me sane and grounded. Reading those poems now returns me to the tones and textures and chaotic/serene inner life of early motherhood. (As in the photos above and below, when I was the mother of a six-month-old infant.)
Maybe poems belong to this strange between-time, when my identity feels threadbare outside of my relationships—mother, daughter, sister, spouse, friend. Thank heavens for friendships, the landing spot for safe ranting and commisseration and truth-telling and kindness. (Not that there isn’t respite and kindness and ranting inside those other relationships too, but friends are a different category of caring and reciprocity; side note, just finished reading The Weekend, by Charlotte Wood, and now I want to write a book about friends—maybe in twenty years or so!)
So. Poems. Self/Other. Making meaning, meaning-making.
Is my CV an incoherent tangle of part-time, contract, volunteer, temporary job-jobs? Or is it a fascinating but partial record of a person who has been a steady, creative, connective presence in the life of her family, for which there is no job title, no description shorter than a novel, and for now at least, no particular beginning or end? Probably both. That’s life.
xo, Carrie
Questions for the table
Questions for the table
Where are we now?
Who are we now?
What if you just accept what is happening?
What does it mean to be tenacious , ambitious, to use your natural born skills?
How do you know if it matters?
Does it matter if what you make is good? (How would you know? Who would tell you? On what grounds would this judgement be made?)
What instinct shall you follow?
What are your priorities, and how are they expressed, through what means?
(Why do you write?) Why do you do what you do?
What do you hope for?
Are there things you want to learn?
Are you done here?
What are you carrying?
Are you well enough to continue?
What would it be about instead?
Where does it hurt? When? How?
What gives you relief?
xo, Carrie
PS This is one of my circle poems, but I will also use each question as a prompt for a future journal entry, to get beyond “what’s on your mind?” A few of the questions are yes/no, but even those can work as prompts, urging an explanation, depending on the tone you’re hearing the questioner speak in.
Can you imagine a dinner party where you’d go around the table asking everyone to respond to one of these questions? Which one would you choose to ask? (Today, I’d like to know, What are you carrying?)
What if i told you?
What if I told you that I was writing poetry again?
Poems have emerged in bursts at particular times in my life. Feast or famine. I began writing poetry in my teens (as many do!), when my emotional life was overwhelming and huge with feelings. Poems gave me a voice for this underlying darkness and fear amidst disruption and change. I was also quite bored and restless. I wrote poetry in the margins while taking notes during many a class, through all my degrees. In my last year of undergrad, I wrote with extremely disciplined pleasure and relief almost every night before bed, in a stream of consciousness style that doubled as a journal. These poems were typed onto my primitive laptop with my eyes closed, and kept in files on discs now defunct. A few poems were published during this period.
Then I got a job and got married. My attention for poetry drifted. I was writing short stories, and novels (or attempting to).
I was in my late twenties, with two small children, when the poems returned. I told myself it was because there wasn’t time for much else. Maybe that was true, though maybe, too, the poetry paired with my boredom and restlessness, the tedium and repetition of pregnancies, nursing, the care of infants and toddlers, the minutiae of preoccupations. But my aspirations had changed from my teenaged years. I’d published a book of short stories. I wanted to publish more—why not a collection of poems? Over several years, I added and subtracted from a motherhood-themed manuscript, landing on the title “Famous Love Story.” While a few individual poems were published, the manuscript never found a home, which at that time I believed was an indication of failure. (As if seeking images, playing with language, searching for meaning, could ever be a failure!) But. That was where I was. I wanted, in my thirties, to find expression for my ambitions, I wanted to accomplish things, publicly, as a writer. I returned to stories and novels. I didn’t write poems for many years (except when responding to prompts along with my students, during the decade that I taught creative writing—late thirties through most of my forties.)
Now, I am in my early fifties. Has poetry returned to me? It is quite a thrill, and I haven’t wanted to jinx it or break the spell—but these past few months, I’ve found myself writing poems, almost daily. It’s a quiet time, dormant, a late spring, and maybe I am again restless and a bit bored and filled with big feelings. News will come and time will shift the ground beneath my feet, but the now is what’s holding me, occupying my attention, and maybe that explains the appearance of poetry, again. The more I write, the more I loosen the rules for myself, invite what’s underneath to spill forth and speak for itself without guessing at or trying to control what it’s here to say. I write by hand in my notebook, using a prompt (often dreamed up on the spot), and afterward, after the free flow, I try to discover a shape or thematic thread in the words and phrases, like gleaning oats or holding out a divining stick.
Anyway … here’s today’s prompt—What if I told you?—and one of the poems that followed.
xo, Carrie
What if i told you?
What if i told you that this morning, when i was walking to the gym, i was hoping that the blossoms had not been blown off the crabapple tree in last night’s storm?
What if i told you that the sky was bright, between bouts of rain, shiny like polished pewter, and i happened to arrive at the intersection just before the train glided past on its quiet path and i waited to cross, knowing i was late, and still when i reached the crabapple tree, still with blossoms intact and deep pink and fragrant on the wind, i slowed and stopped beneath its canopy?
What if i told you that it was like i knew when i looked down to the wet grass there would be a particular small bloom on a stem, broken from its branch—just one—and i would bend to pick it up and breathe it in, as if unhurried, as if i had all the time, all the time?
What if i told you that i carried the bloom by its broken stem across the street, against the light, past the closed storefronts, and into the gym, and placed it on the laces of my running shoes, set with all the other pairs of shoes on the rack, to keep?
What if i told you that by the time i’d walked upstairs to my class i’d forgotten about it?
What if i told you that when i returned, awake and damp with sweat and endorphins, i both saw and remembered the bloom in the same moment, there on my laces, like a gift, a gesture, an honour, and i held it in my fingers with soft pride and delight, hoping others would see its delicate pink petals, and share in this accidental delight too?
What if i told you it was raining again, and cold, and that the wind came at me with such force that as i approached the tree again its fragrance rushed to me, and though the sidewalk was covered in individual petals, and though I looked in the grass, there were no more fallen blossoms on snapped twigs to be seen, just this one that i held to my nose to breathe its smell over and over till i couldn’t distinguish its scent?
What if i told you that i adore you?
What if i told you that my heart has spent its love on blossoms and that i wait each spring for this exact moment of brief dark pink bloom, so that when it comes i might be prepared to stand beneath its beauty?
What if i told you that all the months in between that fill a year are themselves quite marvelous or could be, yet this one tree is what i wait for, this one tree is itself my memory and all that i could ever hold, or bear to hold, or wish to hold, of my love for you?
What if i told you, what would it change?
Being this age and this person
What have I have up to? There’s been some waiting, there’s been some doing, there’s been some not-doing, there’s been enough disciplined activity to justify small treats given to myself (take-out coffee, meeting friends for breakfast).
BEGIN is temporarily quiet. I am planning to read the manuscript out loud in June, as my editor has recommend, to listen for clashes, awkwardnesses, redundancies, overuse of favourite words, etc.
Meanwhile, I am writing essays and poems, personal essays paired with poems, a project that came and found me, not the other way around, so I’m honouring this unexpected discovery with my attention. I visited a writing group earlier this month week, and on Saturday I’m visiting a book club. In May, I plan to travel to Chicago with one of my children who is presenting an academic paper and speaking on a panel (at a Medieval Studies conference). Also in May, I plan to complete certification in Conflict Management and Mediation. What will I do with this certification, how might it be applied? Good question. Are you looking for a coach in your creative life? Maybe something like that. In other news, though it feels tentative, like it could be taken away by impossible-to-square circumstances, I’m starting an MA in Theology, Spiritual Care and Psychotherapy this fall. (My second attempt to do this degree; when I tried in 2018, life got the better of me, and I dropped out before classes had even begun.)
Meanwhile, I am thinking about being this age, and being this person who genuinely enjoys looking after other people. The caregiver role has at times subsumed my identify. During early motherhood, it was (almost) all I wanted to do. (The ambition and discipline to write was threaded in there too.) Now my care turns in the other direction, toward my elders, and again, I recognize that my identity could be subsumed. In recent months, it has felt like I’m sleepwalking, accumulating responsibilities without noticing, till suddenly I’m so tired and sad it feels impossible to continue. This is true. Not all the time, but at least some of the time. I recognize the warning signs. I don’t want to discover myself having sleep-walked into numbness, or resentment, drained of my spark, estranged from my self.
So I’m trying to make a few changes, make decisions that are choices rather than things that just happen, as if I were a passive observer in my own life. Which I’m not. Isn’t it funny, though, how our minds can set traps for us? My own traps usually relate to control, to wanting to be in charge or in the know, when I could just … just … let go, let be. Am I doing this because I want to, or because I believe I should? That’s a good question to ask when I’m stuck in a trap of my own making. What’s this feeling? I sometimes ask too. Where are you feeling it? What’s happened recently that might have knocked up against a tender spot, a fear, a pain that wants to be noticed?
Am I doing this because I want to?
How do you know what you want, really? This question is a challenge, I hardly know how to reply. I like making others happy. I value and prioritize relationships. I know this requires thought and planning, attention, time, energy, and also enough self-awareness to respect my own needs. I need solitary time, rest, intense physical exertion. (But is a need the same as a want?) I could, I can, set aside my own needs for someone else’s. That could, that can, be what I actually really want. How am I to know for sure? It pains me to see people I love struggling or suffering, it cheers me to ease their burdens, if I can.
There are too many layers here to sort into a coherent blog post. Ergo, essays and poems.
Here’s today’s “circle poem.”
Steal your own wealth
Sunshine here across the page
The shadow does not look the same
What put that shame into you, where did it come from?
We lived there.
It passed down through us like light
but poisoned, saying, you are bad
Child in the world
Obvious wound, evidence
Hide or pretend, cover yourself
All these coverings
When everyone, most everyone, yearns
Imagine turning
What would that say?
Shine this quiet light on it.
Heal.
xo, Carrie