Being in the flow...

Many of you will remember some experience where you were engaged in an activity, and in the blink of an eye it seemed as if hours had elapsed. This experience is referred to as being in the flow, and also described as optimal experience. Experiences such as these are therefore frequently remembered as the best time of our life, simply because the activity engages all of our senses to their maximum. This probably explains why the phenomenon has been the cause of so much discussion and scientific experimentation.

One of these experiments aimed to examine the different user experiences that facilitate the occurrence of flow, or in other words, to determine environmental switches that would cause flow. The person who conducted some of these experiments is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and according to his observations the experience of flow would most likely occur due to the following environmental triggers:

• Challenge and require skill
• Concentrate and avoid interruption
• Maintain control
• Speed and feedback
• Transformation of time

According to his research then, it would seem as if environments that we do not find challenging, or that do not require us to exercise any skill would not be conducive to flow. The same would apply if we engaged in a task that causes repeated failure resulting in the failure of skill acquisition. This is an important pre-condition, as a certain level of skill is a pre-requisite towards the achievement of a level of concentration that would result in “losing” ourselves in the task we are performing. If we have achieved this state of being lost in our activity without interruption we will find ourselves in flow for as long as we maintain control.

According to the Wikipedia, the practice of Sufi whirling (or Sufi spinning), is a twirling meditation that originated among the Turkish Sufis, which is still practiced by the Dervishes of the Mevlevi order. It is a symbolic ritual through which the dances or dervishes aim to reach the "perfect". Through this experience the dervishes try to desert their egos or personal desires by listening, thinking [about God] and whirling which resemble the rotation of other beings such as electrons and planets of the micro- and macrocosmos. Even though this all sounds very complicated, I bet most of us can remember a similar experience as children, whirling in space until we lost ourselves in time and topple over on the grass. It does not take a rocket scientist to imagine that if we were to maintain control we could in all probability touch the divinity that the Sufi achieves through their practice of whirling. Our own memory of experience then also explains the concepts of speed and feedback, and the transformation of time that is described in the experiments of Csikszentmihalyi.

The incredible realization that remains after our discovery of being in the flow is that time is as relevant as the action of the observer, and that the divine is as accessible as the next challenge we may find. Something we had always known as children, but seem to have forgotten as adults. It is true what they say about children and the truth. But that is a totally different story!