The Paradox of "Flow"

[gurdonark]

Today I came to work all dressed up in my business suit, eschewing my usual business casual because I had a court hearing in the afternoon. When a morning phone call revealed that the afternoon hearing matter had been resolved, I felt like someone liberated, with extra time to work my "to do" list. In short order, I was able to draft the two pleadings that needed transmission today, the two pleadings I did not plan to finish for some days yet, meet with a number of folks, have important calls, and generally have the sort of productive day I dream of having every day. I even had the time to write a particularly unfortunate work of poetry, which I should have saved in my "private" journal, but instead posted publicly. I also correlated all my Mandatory Contining Legal Education, and answered an e mail or two.

I find "being busy" is a paradox. When I have the most work to do, if I can manage to stay relaxed, I can hit a "flow" in which I can accomplish things quickly and in abundance. On the work front, this partly stems from eighteen years of plowing away at it, making it second nature. The "paradox" really intensifies, though, on the "personal" side. When I am in this "flow", even with a mountain of work, I also read more novels, write more creative material, get in touch with people who matter, ignore the slings and barbs of those who hurl slings and barbs, and generally fire on all cylinders. The more work I need to do, and address, the more time I seem to have to deal with non-work matters. It makes no sense, but that is not the first thing I've said in this journal that has not made sense. Of course, I can only attribute for work purposes hours I actually spend at work, but even so, I seem to be able to spend the hours on the job and find the time for pastimes. Relaxation is a key, as well as a mind alive to challenge, but I don't have a "script" for flow.

The paradox intensifies when I consider that while "flow" sometimes helps really propel me, I have come to learn that a total failure of flow also serves me very well. Sometimes I learn from my down times and my disconnects that I must reconfigure what does not work for me. I'm not saying that I should only do things if they "feel good" or if they "flow". In my experience, speaking only for myself, my "flow" or "lack of flow" does not, strictly speaking, tell me the intrinsic value of the things I do. I appropriately soldier on sometimes at things I have no gift or good feeling about, because I know they are the right things to do. I desist from some things that feel particularly good because I know that I have more important things to do. Sometimes I even learn that my "flow" was in a wholly wrongful cause, or my "lack of flow" was correctly ignored as I finished the task. It may be that I over-edit, and apply my "head" to make decisions which my "heart" should be permitted to make. But I posit, speaking for my own situation only, that while following one's heart only can be quite energizing, it can also be very frustrating. Although I have read the requisite self-help materials and 18th Century poets, what I mean to accomplish in life is more than just the sum of what makes me feel good. I value my head, and if you'll pardon the mixed metaphor, sometimes I feel these thoughts in my head are my heart.

Although I do not automatically trust a lack of flow, I do treat it as a signal which I am sending myself. It's not a "stop sign", it's a blinking yellow light. To adopt the outmoded head/heart metaphor again, I feel that "lack of flow" is my heart sending an invitation to my head. The telegram runs something like "You are respectfully invited (damn it!) to consider whether the trip is worth the travel". I believe it is that pause, usually best done on a walk or in a quiet moment, that lets me add the counters together between how I feel and what I think to try to self-assess. When I am doing my "job" of decision-making right, I then self-correct. When I am not doing that "job" right, I must teach myself to trust myself more.

I wish I could say that all decisions become simple in this way. I love books with titles like "Do What You Love, the Money will Follow". I wish I could say that I've never reconsidered the decisions I've made, or that I never wondered "what if". To take a prosaic example, when I was in law school, I was confident that my "true calling" in life was to be a law professor. I tutored kids, I "led" my study group, and I loved to study law. I was convinced that I was born to teach law school. Because I had exemplary law grades, but went to a "lesser" law school, my appropriate career path "should have been" to practice two years, preferably at a place that would give me resume ribbons, and then go get an LLM degree from a top 10 law school. I would then have a much better than even chance of getting a good law prof job.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Socratic Forum, though. In line with the form sheet, I landed a good job with a solid downtown Dallas midsize firm. The salary was quite good, the work was very stressful, and the intellectual challenge extreme. I am not by nature a "downtown" type of person. I am a small town boy who feels much more at home among down to earth eccentric bright people than among people who live upscale or "insider" or "downtown" lifestyles. I found myself altogether challenged, and often very stressed. The first few years of "downtown" civil law practice are often Hell if you do them right.

At the end of a year, I was "on track" for my dream. If I notched another year of practice, I could depart for my LLM. I could spend a year in the ivory tower. I could strive for a profession in which I could work reasonable hours, do something I knew I'd love, and avoid the rigors of being a law firm associate (i.e., "young lawyer employee, as opposed to partner").

But though my heart told me I was not coping ideally with the stress, and that my dream awaited, my head intervened. I wanted to be good at law. I felt a need to "brave out" my circumstances. I knew, somehow, that I was apprenticed to the sorceror, and I wanted to be able to make the brooms move. I elected to buy a small home in an outlying suburb, to artificially "root" myself, give myself the burden of a mortgage, and force myself to strive on.

My inner voice was telling me that however much my heart sought a rest, the point of what I was trying to do and be required that I actually learn a bit of lawyering, and not merely escape to try to teach it, without real insight, to others. My inner voice, i.e., my head, saved me from the "easy" road, and "forced me" to a more responsible place.

The Dallas housing market tanked in the wake of the the savings and loan crisis, in which thrifts over-built the area and then promptly crashed (at one time in 1987, the "condo market" there had a supply projected to last until 2030 or so) My home went "underwater", i.e., its value declined to less than the mortgage debt (I had put virtually nothing down), I sometimes bewailed that I was "trapped" by my mortgage from "escaping" the rigors of my life. In fact, the minor loss I'd have to take was well less than my small savings. My "heart" was merely seeking its revenge, I suppose, in self-attack. I soldiered on, though, made partner at my law firm, and learned how to practice law.

By the time, years later, a bit of situational-politics work discontent made me next assess the potential for an academic career, the nineties had set in. A massive legal recession had sent bright young lawyers scurrying for academia. I established through a number of applications that I had no chance without an LLM. I faced the potential of having to uproot myself and my wife, do a year without my job income but with high tuition, and yet face an uncertain potential for academic hiring.

My "flow" feeling for academia told me that I should be in an LLM program. My "non-flow" feelings about work told me I should be in an LLM program. But my "head" told me that the opportunity cost was too great. Instead, I foresaw that rather than academia, someday I would have to own my own practice. This road seemed to me to offer an avenue to avoid the things I disliked about practice (which I need not elaborate) and yet give me some of the "make my own way" which academia seemed to "offer".

In the long run, I ended up, of course, owning my own little firm after I left my firm in Los Angeles many years later. I have never regretted that decision, which I took only after exploring a few other options that appeared workable, and might have yielded vastly different results. I'll save for another day the rigors of successfully studying for the patent bar examination, an examination now used by the Angel Gabriel to disqualify unworthy applicants from Heaven, when one is also trying to map one's personal future.

I cannot tie my life up in a simple bow, no matter how much this post tries to do so. I am always concerned, as any good trial lawyer should be, that years of advocacy makes self-justification (the dreaded "cheap grace" again) a bane to which I'm often prone.

But I think I've learned the following:
a. A work flow does not tell one whether one is doing the moral, just, or hard thing, but only tells one that one is productive, and if one can then align with the "right", flow is a wonderful thing, like a really fast computer processor;
b. An absence of flow is not a moral self-judgment so much as a wake-up call to makes my choices on purpose and not by accident. It is not worthwhile to "beat myself up" over a lack of flow or productivity. The dredge of flowlessness is instead a call to choose my poisons. When a poison is chosen, then I should not continually bewail that one chose strychnine. The poison flows through my psyche so quickly, that bewailing the obvious is merely putting subtitles on something that's already enunciated in very plain English. If it's time to choose another poison, I do so, in a committee involving head and heart;
c. I do not trust heart over head, and sometimes I trust head over heart. But I've learned that when both heart and head
coalesce into one decision, then letting a failure of courage keep me from that decision is an error; and
d. What matters is not only how it feels, but what it means.
It's okay, for me anyway, to live in a world of ideas, sometimes, just as much as it is okay to live in a world of feelings. It's also very much okay to set real goals, and then make them happen. I am a dreamer who believes in making things happen, and this is what I learned when I was awake. I still must remind myself of this daily--choose my life on purpose, make things happen. I fail at many things, and many of my choices go awry. I am no good at many day to day organizational type things. But I like that I can choose and act. Even if I choose wrongly, the ability to act on a choice is important to me.

I read the above, which borders on psycho-babble (if, thankfully, my own babble), and wonder if this is merely another needless exercise in self-justification. But I'll post it anyway, as I think that a key challenge for me is valuing my doubts, my thoughts and my analysis without quite yielding to the defensive fears all three can cause. If I've learned one thing in my life, it's that making choices, and having the courage to implement them, is what has worked for me. I am not confident I've made the right choices. But I've learned to be confident I can make them, as difficult for me as that can be sometimes. I think that the inner voice is more than how one feels, but a gestalt of thought, feelings and everything. The critical shortfall for me is not really only "self-esteem" or "positive thinking", it's the fundamental willingness to make and implement decisions. The ability to do that, really, is more important than how I "feel", or even than how it "flows". As I titled this post, speaking for me, and only for me, it's a paradox.

But I'll still hope that this week's "flow" lasts all year!

Comments

Flow Boat to Rural TX

[lonestarslp.livejournal.com]

Your flow analogy makes perfect sense to me. I move "in" and "out" a lot; however, due to my mental condition, my flows have been a little more extreme. I like to think that sometimes we are guided by God into what we really ought to be doing rather that what we think we ought to be doing. I started my graduate school career with a very specific goal in mind: to work in a specific school district. However, that was not to be. It was hard for me to accept at first because I thought that was what I was meant to do. Now, however, I am thrilled at the opportunity that I have been given and feel that it is a place where I can really make a difference. And making a difference was really my ultimate goal, anyway.

Re: Flow Boat to Rural TX

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

The funny thing about expectations is that having them is a very good thing, but being able to adjust them to make life "really work" is even more important. Now that I see where a few of the externals in my life seem to be "set", I really want to try to figure out how to conquer a few flaws I have allowed to persist.

I think you're right about how making a difference--however one defines it---that's the ultimate goal.
The ultimate goal is meaning.

[amatrixangel.livejournal.com]

The ultimate goal is meaning.

"Life has only the meaning you give it"

- God

..(supposedly), from N.D. Walsch's book Conversations With God

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

No matter what one's belief in the externals, one's experience of life certainly arises from the meaning one finds in it!

Going with the Flow

[reneesarah.livejournal.com]

There is a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who has writte a lot about flow. According to him, these are the characteristic dimesnions of a flow experience:

1- Clear goals: an objective is distinctly defined; immediate feedback: one knows instantly how well one is doing.

2- The opportunities for acting decisively are relatively high, and they are matched by one's perceived ability to act. In other words, personal skills are well suited to the challenge.

3- Action and awareness merge; one-pointedness of mind.

4- Concentration on the task at hand; irrelevant stimuli disappear from consciousness, worries and concerns are temporarily suspended.

5- A sense of potential control.

6- Loss of self-consciousness, transcendence of ego boundaries, a sense of growth and of being part of some greater entity.

7- Altered sense of time, which seems to pass faster.

8- Experience becomes autotelic: If several of teh previous conditions are present, what one does becomes autotelic, or worth doing for its own sake.

pgs. 178-179 The Evolving Self

I have had this experience, more often than not when I am doing photography. But rather than time speeding up, time ceases to exist, and the experience seems suspended outside of time. When I leave the "flow" state it often true that much more time has passed than I would have imagined. But when I am in the state itself I have no consciousness of time, only of passionate engagement in what I am doing. Another feature, at least for me, is the loosening of boundaries... wherein where I begin and end flows into what I am doing without perceived boundaries of self and other.

Re: Going with the Flow

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Thanks for commenting. That last paragraph sums it up. My wife reminded me that she had shown me an article on the fellow you mention, though neither of us could remember his name. That's an interesting bit of research, about which I'd like to know more.
I like that "eternal time" and "loosening of boundaries" that you mention. I know that feeling, but my "flow" is not quite as unrestrained as that. Maybe even my "flow" lacks "flow".

Re: Going with the Flow

[reneesarah.livejournal.com]

I knew I had one of his books upstairs, and I had to go and get it so I would be able to spell his name. I would never have been able to do it without the book in front of me.

I am sure your flow is just fine. (Grin)

Re: Going with the Flow

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I must admit that I'm relieved, vaguely, that you didn't spell his name from memory :)

Re: Going with the Flow

[reneesarah.livejournal.com]

Damn, if I was that good, I definitely shouldn't be unemployed!

Re: Going with the Flow

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

LOL. I've been following your employment posts assiduously. I hope things work out more positively soon!

Re: Going with the Flow

[reneesarah.livejournal.com]

I have had the feeling that I am boring whatever readers I have with my unemployment posts... and when I post yet another sad tale about joblessness that the reaction is no doubt: "Not THAT again!" (I am bored with it too, but sometimes howls of protest do escape my keyboard.)

I do wonder sometimes if we live in a random universe that we attempt to impose meaning upon just to keep ourselves sane- and thus there is no message or lesson in this.... or if we live in a kinder universe in which there is meaning and some lesson in this which apparently I have not been getting or am ignoring.

Re: Going with the Flow

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I believe we live in a universe with literal meaning, but my friend asphalteden (who writes a fascinating journal, by the way) posited to me the equally impressive idea that there is no "human" meaning to things, but we must create meaning because that is what we do. Either way, I think meaning is important to people.

Re: Going with the Flow

[reneesarah.livejournal.com]

I believe that if meaning does not objectively exist, that we must create meaning. To live without meaning is to live in an existential abyss... Everyone creates meaning, even if they propose there is no meaning, and we live in a meaningless universe. In that case, humans become the heroes of stories we create about making meaning in a meaningless universe.

I would bet that this urge towards meaning making is hard wired in the brain. Does the meaning making wiring have some evolutionary, survival value? Or if we are divinely created, as I would prefer to think, made in the image of the great story teller, perhaps our propensity toward meaning making and story telling is a way of our participating in the continuing unfoldment of creation?

Re: Going with the Flow

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I do think that the need for meaning is hard wired, whether by God or by a chaotic evolutionary trend.
The search for meaning got us this far, and I feel we cannot leave it behind now!

Re: Going with the Flow

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

oh, and you're anything but boring. In the back of my mind, I keep wondering if you should change regions of the country, because I believe your skill set in our benighted region would not be as problematic getting employed. Heck, a lot of those jobs are so darn tough that they have to hunt people for them. Maybe where you live is different.

[espvivisection.livejournal.com]

I do not trust heart over head, and sometimes I trust head over heart. But I've learned that when both heart and head coalesce into one decision, then letting a failure of courage keep me from that decision is an error[...] But I like that I can choose and act. Even if I choose wrongly, the ability to act on a choice is important to me.

These combined things were the hardest for me to learn. I like to dream, and create elaborate plans for those dreams, imagining all the in-roads and hurdles and ways over or around the hurdles I can, as well as all the side roads not taken I might concieveably miss along the way. In doing so, I sometimes ignore that "now" is often as a good a time as any to make those dreams a little closer to reality.

I wanted to be a lawyer for ten years (7-17), and I still think about it occasionally. And I used to think I was going to end up a programmer or a graphic designer. I never really thought I'd be a professor, but over the last two years, a discipline and a way of life and a previously unrecognized strength area just found me, and even though the statistics for actually getting that dream academia job are more than a little bit intimidating, I feel like I have no recourse but to try. I'm not only good that this, but I happen to love it; if it means sacrificing now, and even to some extent later, to have a chance to do something I love, then i have to try. Bring on those loans! <g>

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think that's an important point. The problem with a being a "calculating dreamer" is that one can play out all the possibilities in one's head, erecting and destroying roadblocks, but then never actually be willing to launch out and do. I believe that it's a safety mechanism; after all, if one fails in one's dreams, then one imagines the hassle of "actual failure" can be foregone. But I think that one has to calculate carefully and then do. In your case, I'm glad you've figured out a direction in life (bring on those loans, indeed). I hope you achieve your goals; based on the evidence of your journal, I'd guess you have a good grip on what you want and how to get there. But although I hope very much that you literally get everywhere you want to go,
I still think your trip is enhanced by the effort to get there.
I think you said it just right-- you have to try.
It's good when head and heart tell you what your appointed task may be.

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

You are the antithesis of me!

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Perhaps this means you will achieve more, and compromise less.

Re:

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

Pah! Somehow, I don't think so.

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's early days yet. We're something like 10 days short of 15 years' difference in age, I believe.

I like that word "pah" as an expression of amusement. I keep trying to picture in my mind the sound of how "pah" becomes a note of amusement.

warning! "too much information" dump ahead...

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

It's funny that this should come up right now. I feel I'm on the verge of a real crisis, one that's been building now for a year, at least. I just read an article about how women are uniformed about age-related infertility. I'm already on the downward slide! I had no idea. I am uninformed. And I'm scared. There are decisions to be made and cliffs to jump from. But I feel paralyzed. Ugh. I was just about to make a ludicrous "to do" list. How can I focus on a silly job when the the real job, my life, is in such a state of confusion? I feel like hiding. Please send some of your motivation and work ethic this way, please.

Thanks,
feckless in Richmond

When I was 28 on the verge of turning 29....(too much info)

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

14 years ago. When I was about to turn 29, it was 1989. I was spending one week in Dallas, and one week in Los Angeles on an alternating schedule. I had a house in Mesquite, TX, which was deeply underwater. I came home one weekend from LA, and the Housing and Urban Development folks had foreclosed out virtually all my neighbors; the prices dropped dramatically. I had not been made a partner in my firm; in fact, I had rather pointedly been passed over while others of no particular greater merit were made partner in my firm, because they definitely "looked the part" far better than me. I was exhausted; my office, my car and my life seemed so disorganized that I could not believe it, and I had serious inner questions about what should I be, along the lines of my post. I had strong doses of "is that all there is?" and moderate doses of "I'm not really appreciated or understood for who I am". Fortunately, I'd at least met my future wife by then, but only this social grace saved my life from being one long stressful thing. I worked hours that were unbelievably long, yet much shorter than the workaholic people around me. I suffered the slings and arrows of some office politics; although I am okay at office politics, I hate to have to play them, and yet was forced to constantly. I was seen by those around me as very bright at what I do, but so outside the mold that every work review had a sort of "brilliant, but we don't know we put up with...." quality. I felt I had jumped all my cliffs, and landed wrongly on many of them. I guess the thing I learned is that to the extent I slogged through and trusted myself, things worked out. To the extent that I just worried and stayed stuck in place, it took me longer to work out the better place in which I ended up.
We may indeed be antitheses. Certainly, you're a much more complex
thinker than I am, and this may be a source of added stress for you.
But I imagine, without sufficient evidence, that you at 28 are not that different, really, than I was at 28. I also imagine that at 42, you'll also be a lot more happily settled. It's not that I ascribe to you some magic power to "win", it's just that this "place of cliffs" is the place from which it is inevitable that you will make the choices of whom you really want to be. If there is one virtue that you have in spades, it is the virtue that for you life must have meaning. You're fortunate enough to be at the place in your life in which you choose the meaningful cliffs to which to hop. I don't mean to simplify the pain or pontificate some vast solution, because it is painful, it must be gone through, and I haven't the foggiest, even after reading the facts and inferring the omitted facts in your journal, what is the right path for you. But what I learned, and I learned it with such vigor that I'll suggest it may be a universal, is that when you're in the place you're in now, you inevitably make the hops to what matters. If you find you've hopped amiss, you hop again. But you're just too intensely interested in the result not to hop to what you perceive will give you meaning. The cross you bear is that ultimately you're going to take up a cross for what really matters for you. It's that cross that will burden you, but ultimately save you.

As far as which way to jump in your current crises, I cannot
pretend to tell you anything. I can only say that my impression of you is that both your "head and heart" have some idea of who you are in life, and now it's just a matter of trying to make the external choices that go with that. But even that last sentence sounds like I have a clue I don't really have.
I wish I could export work ethic or calm or something.
I'm actually thinking about the issues I haven't solved, and whether journaling those will help me begin to solve them.
I sure wish I had the organizational skills that folks other than me have.

All I can export are good wishes, feeble comfort though they be.

Re: When I was 28 on the verge of turning 29....(too much info)

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

Many thanks for your ever-kind and gracious words! I hope I didn't imply that I'm in some sort of painful situation, because I'm not. I'm just so damn confused most of the time! Muddled. That's the right word, I think. But I guess that also implies that I'll muddle through. "30" for me has this kind of heavy-handed import that I'm sure it holds for a lot of people. I feel like I should have some things sorted out by then, but time is getting short. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

my biological wisdom clock....

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

'"30" has this kind of heavy handed import'

Funny you say that. I've been thinking for some time that 43 is the point at which I'm actually *old*, and yet look how many things I've yet to solve.

As I get older, the milestones move.

[amatrixangel.livejournal.com]

I fail at many things, and many of my choices go awry

"My painting is only but the sum of my mistakes."

-Rembrandt

..he turned out to be a pretty good painter :)

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

That Rembrandt had a way with a quote!