On Flow

The metaphor of "flow" is one that many have used to describe the sense of effortless action they feel in moments that stand out as the best in their lives. Athletes refer to it as "being in the zone," religious mystics as being in "ecstasy," artists and musicians as aesthetic rapture. Athletes, mystics and artists do very different things when they reach flow, yet their descriptions of the experience are remarkably similar.--Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 

Here, Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chick-SENT-me-high") has written a self-help book that is truly helpful. He shows how people are often in flow when playing at games and sports, which have clear goals and immediate feedback, and much less so when watching television, which, obviously enough, requires much less ability and isn't intrinsically rewarding. The aim is to maximize the amount of flow you get out of every day.

Clearly, Proust was in flow when he wrote In Search of Lost Time. He needed quiet and solitude in order to concentrate, so he worked night after night in a cork-lined room. In a letter to a friend, he describes his writing regimen: "Never have I lived like this, eating once every forty-eight hours, never before three in the morning, etc., etc." (Notice the telltale mark of "flow" in a lack of awareness of bodily needs.)

In turn, in reading Proust, I am in a state of flow. The last one hundred pages of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower passed as if a dream of a dream. A cloud of Lolita-like nymphs of summer frolicked on the grassy knolls of the fictional seaside resort, Balbec. In my concentration, I lost track of time and self...

Csikszentmihalyi cites "love of fate" as necessary for a good life. He quotes Nietzsche, who wrote: "My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity...Not merely bear what is necessary...but love it."

Proust's character Marcel might writhe in pain over a troublesome love affair or express disappointment at some long-anticipated event or encounter, yet he sees beauty in everything.

In the last lines of the second volume, the summer at Balbec doesn't simply end, but becomes a relic in itself. Marcel recalls his maid, Francoise, unpinning the blinds in his windows after he has taken a nap:
"the summer's day that she uncovered seemed as dead and immemorial as a mummy, magnificent and millennial, carefully divested by our old servant of all its wrappings and laid bare, embalmed in its vestments of gold."

As Allen Ginsberg would say: holy, holy, holy...