November 10, 2013

November 10, 2013

Dear Reader, 

Yesterday was a nerve wrecking day, but I survived. I am certain I did the right thing by not getting into an argument. Today is my day off. I find my writing a bit stale. Perhaps it is because I notice I do no longer get emotional, while I write about how I feel. My boredom co-occurred with a lack of emotional involvement. My interest, by contrast, peeks with increased emotional involvement. With this typing, I achieve a better sense of concentration than by writing with a pen. I think about what I want to say more when I use the computer and I keep adjusting it until it is right. This fine-tuning, is a process, which was absent in my handwriting. It usually only occurred in the flow of things. 

Perhaps, the flow of things was overrated? I think it was, but I can no longer think of reasons why. It is fair to say I have sacrificed and given up a lot in order to achieve and maintain flow. I wonder why it was so important to me? I say was, because I no longer think this way. While writing these words, I am aware there is no flow and it does not bother me at all. There is a sense of relief that I no longer feel the need to be fluid. I never thought of solidity as one of my personality traits. For a long time the idea of being someone, who acts and thinks in a particular way, was abhorred and refused by me, but now I can happily accept and enjoy I am that person, who writes and who thinks these thoughts. 

I think that my emphasis and insistence on flow evolved from the position I had within the family in which I grew up. It was not so much my flow that was important, but the flow of the family, the larger mechanism of which I was a part. My thinking, with its many tensions and anxieties, was determined by how to get along. Moments in which that happened, were among my happiest memories of my brothers, sisters and my mother and father. Because I experienced that it was possible, I wanted to talk about it. Although for all sorts of reasons this was often impossible, convergence of this seeing and this talking, created an emphasis on flow in my personality and planted a seed in me.This writing is the sprouting from that seed. Because this seed germinated a long time ago, I and my wife decided not to have any children. We do not pass on our genes, but we live in and pass on this flow, which so often is made impossible by others. We know what very few people know and our marriage of 28 years is based on it. A person’s flow determines they are absorbed by what they do. Although people try to cultivate these feelings of energized focus, nothing is usually said in such an account about the extent to which the thinking of such a flowing person depends on his or her environment, on others.  

  

Instead of recognizing that flow is about ideal interaction between an organism and its environment, it is often assumed that the organism itself is predisposed with an intensely focused motivation, spontaneous joy or some supernatural ability to focus on nothing but the activity itself. Supposedly, this focus on one particular behavior is so deep, that one forgets about oneself and one’s emotions. The state of let go, we call flow, has a lot to do with others and our relationship with them. Without their support, we would be stuck. Flow is not ours, we need others to maintain it. Others, who enjoy seeing us flow reinforce us. Without them there would be no purpose to any of our skillful moves.