I clicked on the artistry on the Google start page a couple mornings ago, a pastel image of a man with a lot of flowing energy depicted and came upon Mihaly Czikszentmihaly a Hungarian-American who died a couple years ago, a psychologist who studied flow. I'd never heard of the man before honestly, but since I talk about writing in flow and staying in flow, I thought it might be interesting to learn more about his work.
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I experience flow as a sort of deep concentration and focus and it used to be that I could stay in it for hours. The enemy of flow, as I experience it, is interruption. Your own cell phone going off for instance. Other people's. My local library is not so quiet. Libraries used to be refuge but are now mostly distraction. Finding a bolt-hole is necessary.
Some people have learned how to tune out all the distractions around them - loud music - conversations - and focus intently on their computer, maybe with earphone or earbuds and some low volume relaxing music. I have some " relaxing music" YouTube videos that I choose to listen to while writing.
Silence and quiet, hearing only the sound one makes from physical activity and that of nature around us, is rare but desirable. In our experience now, we are so used to 'aloneness' with sound, in particular music, movies, films - information (some would say programming) coming in - or bombarding us - that fear can be experienced in silence and quiet. However, I suggest we go without this bombardment from sound when we are writing, also, because we need the thoughts, insights, and intuitions, coming in to us that may be obscured when our brains are also engaged in processing the audio incoming.
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What does Mihaly Czikszentmihaly think?
CLAREMONT COLLEGE GRADUATE PROGRAM : PEOPLE : MILALY CZIKSZENTMIHALY
U CHICAGO : MIHALY CZIKSZENTMIHALY FATHER OF FLOW
