Book Review: Flow - everyone should read it

The book is called "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  Thanks to Liz Garnett for bringing it to my attention!

I realize that the title of this post has given away my review, but I'm really enthusiastic about this book because at some level I needed to read it. I'm reviewing it here because I think you might need to read it too. This book is amazing and I can not possibly do it justice in a short review. But I will try.

The subtitle of the book is "the psychology of optimal experience" and it is full of wisdom and insights about how to enjoy yourself in every aspect of your life - your work, your hobby, your creative life, your family life and even your solitude. I had a dozen "aha" moments reading it, and I believe it will help me move my own experience of life to a better place, not that it was awful to start with!  And it's relevant to stage performance too: the various modes of stage performance are a powerful way to express your real self and enter into a flow experience, and organizing your stage performance (or any other) activities so that they encourage flow is a great way to make your whole experience more enjoyable and effective, from rehearsal to stage time.

So first things first - "flow" is a state of mind that becomes possible when you are involved in an activity that has:

1. Clear goals - you know what you're trying to do
2. Instant feedback - you can tell if you're making progress towards your goals
3. Challenges matched to your skills - it's not too easy or too hard
4. Action and awareness are merged - your concentration is entirely focused on what you're doing

Playing music, for example, has clear goals and instant feedback.  You know what notes are coming up, and you know if you hit them right or you didn't.  You can also pick music that is appropriate to your level of skill, so you don't get distracted by boredom or anxiety.  The same could be said of any other stage performance mode like acting, singing or dancing.

When your concentration is completely fixed on what you're doing, you will also be excluding irrelevant things from your attention, such as thoughts of your self that may lead to stage fright.  There is no attention spared to worry about failure.  You cease to be conscious of your self.  Often your perception of time will be distorted as well - this is the same as Eckhart Tolle's idea of being in the Now, unconstrained by the past and the future, hence outside of the perception of time.

Being in "flow" also reminds me of how Stanislavski discusses the ideal state of mind for stage performance, where you have immersed yourself in the "given conditions" of a scene so completely that you cease to be conscious of your self as separate from the action, and the subconscious takes over the direction of your activities.

Once you can get into flow with an activity, it becomes enjoyable for its own sake.  Flow is enjoyment, and if you can spend your whole life in a state of enjoyment, regardless of the conditions in which you find yourself, you will have led a wonderful life.  In order to go along with this idea, you first need to admit that your state of mind is completely in your control, and not produced by your circumstances.

Applying flow to stage performance, just like an great art, is partly a matter of staying in the moment rather than executing a plan:

Whereas a conventional artist starts painting a canvas knowing what she wants to pain, and holds to her original intention until the work is finished, an original artist with equal technical training commences with a deeply felt but undefined goal in mind, keeps modifying the picture in response to the unexpected colors and shapes emerging on the canvas, and ends up with a finished work that is responsive to her inner feelings, knows what she likes and does not like, and pays attention to what is happening on the canvas, a good painting is bound to emerge. On the other hand, if she holds on to a preconceived notion of what the painting should look like, without responding to the possibilities suggested by the forms developing before her, the painting is likely to be trite.

In the present day, as it becomes more and more difficult to keep performance and art funded in the school system, it is critically important that we recognize and are able to articulate the value of stage performance and art in our culture.  Otherwise we will quickly lose it, and we will fail to reap its rewards.   The author sees art and culture as the vessel into which we put our hard-earned learning about our own consciousness as a species.  To be successful as a person and find meaning in life, you need to learn from those who have gone before:

The strategy consists in extracting from the order achieved by past generations patterns that will help avoid disorder in one's own mind. There is much knowledge - or well-ordered information - accumulated in culture, ready for this use. Great music, architecture, art, poetry, drama, dance, philosophy, and religion are there for anyone to see as examples of how harmony can be imposed on chaos. yet so many people ignore them, expecting to create meaning in their lives by their own devices.

That paragraph makes the point powerfully for me.  Protecting art and performance in our culture is critical if we are to develop as a species in time to save our world.

I sincerely feel that everyone should read this book, and put its advice into practice as I intend to.  I believe that you should read this book, because as a member of the human race I care about you and I want you to enjoy your life more, for your sake, and for the betterment of our world.