The incessant rainy weather we’ve been experiencing here in Glen Ellen has me feeling a bit listless. So, I was quite interested when I came across The 6-Day Energy Challenge by Jancee Dunn in the NY Times which was offering ways to feel good and get yourself reenergized.
The title for Day 5, “The Magic of Losing Yourself in a Task,” looked particularly promising to me. Those who know me will understand why the “losing yourself” in the title would resonate with me. Being somewhat “directionally challenged,” losing myself has been an integral part of my life for as long as I can recall.
The woods at Fort A.P. Hill, Virginia – site of my ill-fated assault on an “enemy bunker” in my OCS days.
Take for example the time when I was in army OCS (Officer Candidate School) and I had to lead a platoon though the woods in the dark of night to find an “enemy” bunker using a terrain map. I only realized that I had led my platoon in the exact opposite direction when we snuck up to a busy freeway instead of the bunker. Fortunately, I had the good sense to not let any of my men fire blanks at the cars zipping by.
But Jancee Dunn wasn’t writing about that kind of “getting lost.” It turns out that the “losing yourself” in the title is just a metaphor. What she is really driving at is that we can rejuvenate our energy level and sense of well-being by immersing ourselves in what is called “the flow state” (actually, concern with the flow state is another thing I can relate to – as can many men my age – but she’s not talking about THAT kind of flow).
What she means by “flow state” is a period of “intense focus that comes from being completely absorbed in an activity.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the pyschologist who coined the term, claimed that when you’re in “flow,” time and self-consciousness melt away. This supposedly has something to do with how “being in the flow” produces neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine and dopamine, which make you feel energized.
In what kinds of tasks can we lose ourselves and get into the flow? Jancee Dunn offers a number of examples to get us thinking.
- take up flower pressing
- learn a foreign language
- play mindless games
- try a paint-by-numbers kit
- tackle an adult Lego set
- start playing pickleball
- plant an herb garden
- take up salsa dancing
With the exception of the mindless games suggestion, nothing on that list speaks to me. But lately I have been absorbed in an activity where time and consciousness seem to melt away (that is, if consciousness melting away is the same as going insane). That activity is revising the appearance of our blog. You may recall my post from last month, “Nightmare on Railroad Street: The Case of Our Disappeared Appearance.” In it I described the tragic loss of our blog theme and my struggle to find a replacement. Well, the struggle continues and we are still in the process of searching for an appropriate “look” to our blog.
While I began todays post by claiming that I was mistaken about what it means to be lost in the flow state, it turns out that maybe I wasn’t as far off target as I had imagined. When you consider that my being in this flow state involves trying to navigate a very confusing world of widgets, sidebars, CSS code, headers, and footers, it is plausible that one literally can get lost.
In any case, keep your eye peeled for changes in our blog’s appearance. And if you do notice any changes, you will know that I didn’t head toward a freeway and may actually have gone in the right direction (for once).