Entering Flow

In Taoism, “wu-wei” is described as the ideal state of being. It is commonly translated as “effortless action.” Here in the west we associate it with the “flow state” or being “in the zone.” Though it can be translated as “inaction” or “inexertion,” it does not exclude vigor. You can strive passionately and intensely and still be in a state of wu-wei. What it excludes is laboriousness. There are two different kinds of “effort” - one where you exert yourself and end up exhausted but satisfied, and another where you struggle to maintain focus and fight against a perpetual sense of discomfort. The former is rewarding and sustainable with proper rest, the latter is grating, unsustainable, and needs to be addressed. (And unfortunately I think many people spend a great deal of their work life in the latter state.) I think of it as healthy vs unhealthy pain, for example, the pain of exercise vs the pain of deliberately putting pressure on a broken limb. It’s like that, but purely psychological. Wu-wei is “effortless” with respect to the second kind of effort, but not necessarily the first.

This flow state is about effortless execution. For me, I want writing to be as natural a process as possible - I’m not as concerned with the final product as much as I am with how writing itself feels. I do think the reader is more likely to enjoy reading something if it’s clear the author enjoyed writing it. But learning to enjoy the process is its own reward. It’s like becoming proficient at an instrument - yes, it would be nice to make a living as a jazz saxophone player. But you shouldn’t do it because other people might enjoy it, you should do it because it’s a joy to master an instrument to the degree that you can improvise and let loose.

A good place to start is, why do you stumble? Why do you hesitate? One reason might be that you stumble for the same reason a baby stumbles, or a novice musician sounds like shit. You haven’t mastered the skill yet. There’s nothing you can do but keep doing it until it starts to feel natural. I would argue that in that case, your effort falls into the first category of “healthy” effort. Practice can be exhausting, frustrating, but still ultimately satisfying. Struggling to master a skill is suffering. The art of practice is like turning water to wine. What you learn is precisely how to enjoy the process. Or rather, the process of making any process enjoyable. You remain attentive to what you are doing and latch onto any little particular which you find pleasurable, no matter how small, and notice it again and again. You bring the little subconscious bits of satisfaction in a difficult process to the surface so that you learn intuitively what makes the activity “worth it” for you. You invent little rituals which help reinforce certain behaviors, making you want to go back again and again for an emotional reward you are familiar with.

But lack of mastery is not the only thing that can trip you up. Suppression, perfectionism, and a preconceived notion of the “ideal” can also act as barriers. Your mind is a never ending web of associations. Once you get those neurons firing, thoughts will simply begin to flow. But they might not be the thoughts you intended to have. Maybe you sat down expecting to write about a specific topic, and find that you end up going on tangents which you end up having to cut. You see this and try to catch yourself in the act. I have to stay on topic, I have to stay focused, I started writing with a particular message in mind. But in attempting to regulate your stream of consciousness, you end up striving to control something which you may find you have disturbingly little control over. You dip your cup in the river of your mind, but when you take a sip, it tastes funky. That’s not what I came here for. How could I feel as if I know what I want to say, yet when I go to say it, something entirely different comes out?

Rather than imagining the process as that of an engineer who has a very specific structure in mind and simply drills down to the level of detail in service of a preconceived whole, allow yourself to get carried along a current of thoughts which arise largely out of your control. You are attentive to what surfaces in the moment. That is what makes it pleasurable. It’s like playing an active (as opposed to turn based) game. When you play a game, either a physical sport or real time video game, you act seamlessly and continuously in response to your environment, and your environment reacts continuously to you, in the form of the behavior of other players or characters. When you express yourself creatively, in music, dance, speech or writing, your mind is the environment you are continuously reacting to. In expression, to continue the analogy with a game, you are both the environment and the player. That is why all forms of creative expression can rightly be called part of a process of self-discovery. You are quite literally experiencing yourself as an unpredictable environment, and learn to react to it. Just like a game where there are goals and objectives which create the context for certain actions to become emotionally rewarding, that idea you are itching to express, which you have not yet articulated, is the objective.

But when you play a game, the objective is not what actually ends up being satisfying - it is only a necessary precondition for an endless variety of tactics which are part of the mastery and execution of the sport. For example, say you are playing basketball. Your goal is simple - put the ball in the hoop. But what is enjoyable about playing basketball is how it feels to take the shot, to juke another player to get around them, to successfully execute a strategy to outplay the other team. What is enjoyable about playing basketball is the moment to moment experience of execution, and the intellectual task of creating tactics and strategy. The goal itself is only a pretext for all of this activity. And that is how it is with creative expression - that idea which you are itching to express is like the hoop - it is empty in itself. The reason you feel like you have something you want to say, but then find surprisingly that you can’t articulate it, is because the feeling itself is a trick of the mind. Your mind makes you feel like you have something to say, not because you actually do, but to make you attempt to say something.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t follow that feeling. That is your emotional reward. Like a jazz musician who can feel the next part coming on, it is not that there is anything actually there waiting for you - the feeling acts as a pretext to play the next note. You then retroactively feel as if you have “gotten it out of your system.” But it was not that it was in your system, and you have now gotten it out. It was simply that the urge to engage in activity was there, you satisfied the urge, and you retroactively say to yourself, “yes, exactly, that was it.” But think about it - before you did it, you couldn’t articulate what “it” was. If it was already there, you would have already been able to articulate it, and there would be no urge. The feeling of “I’m onto something” is the urge to fill a void, and then pretend as if there was something there all along. But this fiction of pre-existence is important. It does in some sense already exist, as a potential. It is a hoop, and a ball hasn’t been put in it yet. But there will be a ball. It is pre-ordained that a ball will enter the hoop. But it is the space between the empty hoop and scoring the goal where everything interesting happens.

The grand edifice you seek to construct is a retroactive imposition of structure onto the raw materials provided by stream of consciousness. You finalize something which satisfies your initial craving to articulate a thought by organizing and editing the material you’ve created. Something appears out of nothing, and then you shuffle it around and remove bits here and there, and add a few bits if you feel something is missing. This is the most deceptive, narcissistic stage of writing. You do it to create the appearance that you are a genius who immediately nails it on the first try. The reader can’t envision the process you went through to arrive at the end product. They don’t get to see how it looked before it was trimmed and neatly packaged. A narcissist will tell you that it is simply the polite thing to do for the reader. But don’t listen to them. They want to mystify how their mind works and construct an impenetrable veil between author and reader, making them look oh so clever. How’d they do it? I’ll tell you how - they vomited something out and then shuffled it around. Beware people who like editing more than writing - they want to control how they are seen a bit too much. They are too Apollonian. They lack the Dionysian sensibility.

That is a nice segway to my final point - controlling how you want to be seen is the ultimate obstacle to entering flow. What is insecurity? What is shame? They are about the urge to conceal. They are selfish emotions about controlling how you are perceived. We are afraid of rejection, judgment, abandonment. If you’re feeling more generous, we are afraid of imposing on others, making them uncomfortable, and being a burden. But fundamentally, we want to be our authentic selves, which involves imposing our complicated feelings on others. We worry about how we will be received. Should I say it? Should I not? We hesitate, and as a result we fumble over ourselves, all the things we don’t want to reveal again and again floating through the river of our mind. As a result we build dams and become pathologically unable to enter flow, to fluidly play the game of expression with ourselves. The only thing to do is to tear them down, and in my mind there is no better way to do this than with writing. You perform for yourself in privacy. You allow yourself to fluidly express all those thoughts you stumble over in day to day life. That is why I’m doing all this - to keep my mind clear of blockages, to overcome all those fears that hold me back, the parts of myself I don’t like to acknowledge, which make me act phony around other people. I want to be real, as real as I can be. If I make others uncomfortable, that’s unfortunate, but it is what it is.

I want to live as much of my life in flow as possible, and I think that’s how most people feel, even if they can’t express it. I don’t only want it to be in writing - I want it to be in my interaction with others. When we have a close friend who we trust, we feel as if we can be ourselves. We don’t have to hold back our vulgar jokes or darker feelings. We know that they won’t immediately think less of us. I want to have those sorts of relationships, and be that person for other people. It can take a lot to establish that kind of trust. But it’s not possible if you aren’t able to be yourself in any context, not even when you are alone in your room in front of your computer or a piece of paper. So practice whatever outlet allows you to express yourself, do everything you can to make the process enjoyable, break down the dams, and let it flow.