Wisdom of Ages

To this day I still cannot remember much from my childhood. Memory being what it is, that could either mean that it was uneventful boring, uneventful horrific, or uneventful happy. Uneventful boring would either have meant that I had some kind of childhood malaise that prevented me from exploring the world like my body was designed, or my environment gave me so little to explore that my mind found muchness in things that amuse it, because that is the way it was designed to do. Our environment abound to fascinate and enthrall, to captivate in natures radiant beauty and blind us in awe of existence. I can understand that in some children the beauty in nature can be the allure to lead them wandering off into the sunset, following the promise of a dream that's better than the one we left behind. According to the elder in my care I was a dreamer, staring off to space and making never-ever journeys to never-never land, and though it sounds like kinda fun to leave it just like that,...

Many of us may remember some experience where we 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 flow, and a few years ago it was the subject of a lot of research that resulted in another, more descriptive term called 'optimal experience'. The reason why such a relatively strange human quality attracted enough attention to become the subject of research, is that such experiences are frequently remembered as “the best time of our life”. One of these experiments aimed to examine the different user experiences that facilitate the occurrence of flow, simply by asking research subjects to describe their flow experience. By analyzing the feedback they formulated the following qualities that are common to the flow experience. Challenge – The activity must be challenging, but not so much that it discourages people from participating. Skill – To complete the activity, a participant must use some kind o...