Flow

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

― Robert Louis Stevenson

Not a few friends of late have suggested pot, now that it's legal, but I have still-life painting to turn me on.

Even when the outcome is fish-wrap―as it routinely is―painting guarantees all the flow pots does, without the attendant risk I'll gobble an entire Entemann's.

Flow―what Confucius called wu-wei—is total absorption in a task. 

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “Me-high Cheeks-send-me-high”) was the first scientist to isolate flow, calling it a privileged "zone" where we leave tedium behind and become rapt with "the time of our lives."

A lecture on secularism by Carl Jung inspired Csikszentmihaly to study the origins of happiness, the end that eludes so many.

Csikszentmihalyi soon discovered that happiness was less an end than a state, spontaneous and temporary; a state people entered when they pushed themselves to work at a difficult task.

He interviewed hundreds of artists to learn how they felt when they worked. 

They told him they felt the art simply, effortlessly flowed from them; and that they felt ecstatic while working.

In Csikszentmihalyi’s words, flow is a "state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter."

"Krazy Kube" by Robert Francis James. Oil on canvas. 16 x 12 inches.