On Flow
Musings
On Flow
Not eternity. Not the infinite. Just a few hours, spent so completely that you forget to check the time.
The cursor blinks. That is all it does for a while. Then my hands move, and somewhere in there I disappear.
I do not notice it happening. That is the whole trick of it. One minute I am hungry, checking the time, aware of my own back against the chair. The next, hours are gone and the fan on my laptop has been humming the whole time without me hearing a second of it.
Psychologists have a word for this. Flow. Skill and challenge meeting in exactly the right place, so precisely balanced that the self just steps out of the room for a while.
I like the word less than I like the thing itself.
Here is what it actually feels like, most days. Not eternity. Just quiet.
The kind of quiet where you stop narrating your own life for a minute and just live inside it instead.
I think about the ceiling of the Vatican more than a reasonable person should. Rows of gold, painted centuries ago by a man on his back on scaffolding, arm aching, paint dripping into his own eyes. I do not think he felt like a god while he was up there. I think he felt like a man with a sore neck who forgot to eat lunch. That is flow too. It rarely announces itself. It just eats the day and hands you a ceiling.
My own version is smaller. A blinking cursor. A sentence that will not sit right until it finally does. Years of bad drafts before a good one arrived without me forcing it.
There is a picture I keep thinking about, from some festival somewhere, giant letters spelling out the word in pool toy colors while a crowd poses underneath it for photos. It is a strange thing to build a monument to. You cannot pose in front of flow. You can only be inside it, and by definition, not notice you are there.
That might be the whole secret. Not chasing the feeling. Chasing the work, and letting the feeling show up as a side effect, uninvited, the way it always does.
I do not write to touch eternity. I write because the cursor is blinking and the only way to make it stop is to fill the space after it. Somewhere in the filling, I lose track of myself for a while. And when I come back, there is a page that was not there before.
That is the whole magic trick. Nothing about it is eternal. It is just a few hours, spent so completely that you forget to check the time.