Caution: My day job is a Human Services professor, and I teach a positive psychology course. Classroom lectures come out of my mouth (figuratively and literally) at the most unusual times.
According to the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990),
"The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing
times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is
stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something
difficult and worthwhile." (Csikszentmihalyi, M., 1990)
The quote above refers to a concept called flow. In flow, sense of time is lost and all that remains is oneself and one's skill and the challenge. Flow becomes a source of well-being.
If you have a creative life, you have probably experienced flow. The night on the stage where you become the character; the dance where you merge with the music, the rhythm of your feet on the floor, the movement of your partner; the writing session where time passes without your notice and you've captured the moment you're writing about.
(I do not mean to imply that flow only comes from creative endeavor -- people with noncreative talent experience flow as well -- repairing a car engine, cross-stitching a sampler, or teaching a class.)
I think creatives, having experienced flow in our creative lives, crave it over and over -- and do not always find it. Dancers have days where they miss their landings, where every movement is effort without reward. Actors have days where they're handed a new script and they can't encompass the character even if they're Method and have literally put themselves in the character's shoes.
Writers have those days when they can't motivate to write, because we look at what we've written and the characters don't shine or threaten, because we've lost the thread in the side plots, because the plot that looked iron-clad has a hole the size of a small house, because we had to go back to doing research (that pierogi place in Krakow haunts me in my dreams). Trust me, I know, because I've dealt with all these lately.
These will pass. Because we've paid our dues and found a level of proficiency that allows us flow, we will find it again when we hone our abilities, regain our focus, and pursue excellence.
Oh gosh -- I discovered a new wrinkle for the world I'm writing in, and it's about flow:
So I have prodigies with "normal" talents who also have talents in less normal categories, talents that can be "weaponized" -- emotional manipulation, perfect recall, fire-starting, etc. These shadow talents are not always available -- could it be because the shadow-talents are fueled by flow?
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