High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘Flow’

It all unfolds as it should.  Everything grows in its own way—clouds, corn, the spruce, the Queen Anne’s lace.  You just have to trust that.  Beneath the ten thousand things, the Great Yes breathes its joy.

We alone, with our childish minds, fight against its flow, boxing with shadows, pretending we’re large and in control.  It’s how we learn.  We, too, grow in our own way, as mad as it sometimes seems.

Even the deviations fit into the plan.  Everything is accounted for.  The imperfections are only apparent.

In the end, it all becomes clear.  The illusions vanish, the shadows give way to the light. And all that remains is the joy of the Great Yes, breathing its endless song.

In that beautiful, timeless place where hours run past unheeded, where you’re fully engaged in what needs to be done, and doing it well, life sings.

Some call it work; some call it play.   They’re both the same when you’re there.  You get in your rhythm, find your stride, and nothing exists but the doing.   Hunger disappears, emotion vanishes, context becomes invisible.

All that exists is the doing–skilled, focused, as natural as breathing, and freeing you somehow, buoying you above all distractions.

It’s only afterwards you feel it, only when it’s over.  And then the satisfaction rushes in, and the joy, and you know it’s what you live for.

From deep within the cosmic heart of the grand and sacred Yes, happiness flows on its stayless course, out into the nebulae and the galaxies with all their fiery stars, out to the very edges of being.  And reaching them, it shapes itself into form, creating new reflections of itself, out of love, out of joy.

It flows with ease in currents of song that generate all the atoms, and they dance to its ever changing melodies.   And when we see them with our slow earth eyes, we give their dances names and imagine that each flowing pattern is a being unto itself.  “Maple,” we say.  “Robin.  Daffodil.”

But the truth of it is that it’s all an endlessly flowing whole, an infinite stream of happiness, pouring from the heart of the all-loving Yes, just to bless us with its joy.

Lift back the edge of your serious and let the music have its way with you.  Just glide on into the flow.  It’s all a matter of perspective, of letting yourself drop down into easy.  A flick of thought, a lick of light and you’re there, caught up in the smooth rhythm of it all, hearing the tune.

Catch the richness of it. Feel its glow wafting up from the inside of your elbows, its colors pooling in your eyes.

Slip slide into play like fingers on strings, like water rolling down glass. Feel the rise and fall of the exquisite joy of it all, rocking you, bringing you home.

The evening came whispering lullabies, and all the forest stilled.  The creek stilled itself, too, listening, listening, as the last faint echo of the day faded away.

Now all that was left was the deep, satin flow far beneath its surface as it smoothed itself against the sleeping stones.  That, and the breath of the trees.

The creek loved this time of day, when it put aside its rippling thoughts, its race to see what waited along the next bend.  Now it had only to rest in the silence of the evening, listening, letting itself become as quiet as the snow.

And as the last little wavelet sank into stillness, the creek felt itself filled with the entire vault of sky, and with the falling sun, and the reaching trees, and it was one with them, and whole.

Once you know your direction, the general way that you need to go for your dream to become your life, once you have made up your mind, made the decision and committed, let go.

That’s the secret.  The Universe knows your dream and how to take you there.  Let go.

Let yourself melt into tomorrow.  The river knows how to flow.

All it asks is your presence, your trust.  Lean into its whispering.  Bend where it bids you to bend.  Dance when it asks you to dance.  Linger, flow, tumble and cascade, but always with ease.  Resist nothing.

The river knows the way.  Let yourself melt into tomorrow.

Grab that something that grabs your mind, that something that makes you lose all track of time and forget everything else in the world.  Open up the biggest space for it that you can make and then climb right inside it and ride it for all its worth.

Feel the tension of its delicious challenges pulling out your skills, teasing you to push just a little bit farther, to stretch just a little bit more.  Catch how it rivets your attention, how it dares you to cross your limit lines and dive into your genius zone headlong.

Watch how it plays with you, teasing out your best, your most inventive and determined.

And when you are done with it, revel in the pride and satisfaction of all that you wrought while under its spell.

That’s flow, man.  That’s riding your passion.  Work, hobby, play, it doesn’t matter.  It’s whatever really turns you on, whatever really turns you into one focused, red hot performer, baby.  Get you some.

The mother duck looked so alert and poised as she sailed out into the pond, a bevy of little ducklings following in her wake.  I imagined she was content, following the path that nature laid out for her, performing all the tasks of motherhood by instinct.  She was made to do exactly what she was doing.

I don’t know, of course, whether ducks feel contentment or not.  But they look pretty peaceful.  It’s hard to imagine them saying, “Geeze, I hate this job.  I can’t go anywhere without all these ducklings following me.  Can’t a girl get a break?”

Not all of us find work that feels like we were born to do it.  When I drive to my office in the morning I sometimes wonder how many of the other commuters are going to jobs they dreamed someday they would do.  Very few of us, I’d wager, despite all the “do what you love, the money will follow” advice out there.  But we do end up in work that allows us to exercise our capabilities and, once we’re past the learning curve, to apply our strengths and talents in performing our duties well.   And to the extent that we apply them, giving our work our focused attention, doing it well, we find satisfaction in what we do.

That combination—engaged attention on an activity where our skills meet its challenges—is the recipe for what psychologists call “flow.”  Feeling neither bored nor anxious, you’re absorbed in the moment, performing with focused attention.  You feel in control. You have a clear sense of what you’re working to accomplish.   You lose track of time.  There’s just the activity.  And at the end of the day, you feel that you did something worthwhile.

In addition to the satisfaction that follows a stretch of being in the flow, the skilled performance of our duties yields other psychic rewards.  It provides us with a sense that we contributed our piece to the larger whole.  The earnings from our work help us feel self-reliant.  The work itself moved the company toward its goals and served its clients or customers.  We were part of society’s rhythm as we performed it, connected.  We held up our part.  We met the expectations of our position.  And those things generate a sense of belonging, pride, and self-esteem.

So it’s Monday and most of us are sailing out into the pond, ready to paddle through another work week.  And most of us grumble about it, and say we would rather be eating bon-bons at the beach, or playing golf or gardening.  But the truth is there’s happiness in duties well-performed, however subtle and overlooked its appearance may be.

“Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end,” said former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  “It’s not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it’s when you’ve had everything to do, and you’ve done it.”

I had one of those days today, and the satisfaction I feel is indeed supreme.  But the key to the satisfaction doesn’t lie in simply being busy.  It lies in being busy with purpose, in knowing ahead of time what you’re aiming to accomplish.  Then you find yourself genuinely engaged in your work; you slip into the flow of it—and that is a glorious thing.

You aren’t thinking about your goal while you’re doing the things that will make it happen; you’re just focused on the task at hand, giving yourself wholly to it, letting it absorb you.  The satisfaction and the realization of progress come at the end, when you look back and see all that you have produced.

Of course one of my goals for the day was to snag some nature photos.  My office was closed for the holiday weekend so I had the luxury of time on my side and decided to drive out to the local wetlands to see how they looked in early spring.  The brush around the marsh was still bleached from winter, and most of the trees surrounding it were still bare.  But the air was filled with the deep twang of the bullfrogs’ croaking and the trill of dozens of varieties of birds.

Although I wasn’t seeking them, I found four birds’ nests altogether.  Now there is product of high industry!  All those leaves and twigs and bits of mud and pieces of straw take countless trips to gather, and focused attention to detail to shape.  But in the end, a home emerges, fine enough to raise young in, strong enough to weather thunderstorms and big winds and pelting rain.  No wonder the birds were singing.  Their goal was clear, their work fully engaging, their final product a work of art.

Their nests weren’t built in a single day.  And the goals I’m working on are long-term, too.  But moving effectively in their direction is delicious work.  And the satisfaction that comes from seeing how much of the road I traveled has me high with happiness.

“Why am I so happy now?” Once again, I asked myself the question that launched this blog.

Surrounded as I was by the fresh beauty of this almost-spring afternoon, finding answers was easy.  Blue sky, laughing brook, the soft pink haze of growing buds on the distant trees, the glorious white branches of the sycamores—who could want more?

I was doing one of my favorite things, connecting with nature, collecting bits of this instant of time with my camera.  I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to be doing.

Today is the three-quarter mark on my journey toward my goal: to make a nature photo every day for a year and post it online.  I wasn’t aware of that as I hunted images, though.  The satisfaction of realizing the milestone came later.

While I was taking photographs, I was totally in the flow of the activity, focused wholly on the moment, on seeing what was there before me with my practiced eye, hearing the crunch of leaves beneath my feet and the rushing of the stream and the singing of the birds.  I was feeling the gentle warmth of the sun on my face and the soft bite of the still-cool air.

Having a goal matters.  A goal gives you a sense of purpose and direction.  It keeps you focused on digging more deeply into your skill sets and strengths.  It teases you into developing your talents.  And as you see that the achievement of it is really only a matter of persistence, it motivates you to keep on keeping on.  It strengthens your will and determination.

But the journey itself is what opens the happiness valves.  The journey engages you and brings you into the present, into the only moment where you are truly alive, the only time when it is possible to take the next step.  And the next, and the next.  And each one is play, even when it is hard work.