Flow State

The thing that had always bugged him about the guy was that he said ‘station wagon’ when he meant ‘pickup truck’. But because he didn’t like the guy, he held back from saying anything about it, in a way that he would never have done if he’d instead been picking up on what someone he liked had said. Funny, that - how you hold in your criticisms, because at some level you know that if you started down the road of saying something honest to this person, you might let all the other stuff spill over as well; and you can’t do that if you envisage having to work with them for the foreseeable future - makes things too uncomfortable.

But now it turns out that the guy is leaving. When the manager made the announcement, it was all he could do to stop himself from pumping his fist and saying ‘yeeeeees!’ But that’s what he’d thought. The guy is a lightweight, too full of himself and his own importance, saying what he thinks are all the right things to the managers - the buzzwords, the jargon, the management euphemisms that happen to be in fashion - but none of it rings true, none of it. ‘Station wagon’ indeed - what a twonk.

Anyway, that wasn’t what he had wanted to talk about at all…but there it was, right at the front of his mind, just waiting for the gate to click open and for gravity to do its work and let the words flow down his neck, along his arms and out to his fingers. Tap, tap, tap on the keyboard - and another unconscious burden of dislike and frustration has been consigned to paper. Well, to a digital storehouse, anyway. He’s so out of touch with neuroscience that he wouldn’t be surprised if it *was* gravity that fed the impulses from the brain and down to the fingertips. At least that kind of explanation would be comprehensible, as opposed to the fog of obfuscation that descends on him whenever he tries to think about how consciousness, imagination and creativity might actually play out in the brain-mind; and as for how these hugely complex mental activities might then be manifested through the motor cortex and into the fingers, all the time being subject to multiple feedback mechanisms (where the arms are, how hard the fingers are hitting the keys, how the eyes are tracking the keyboard and the screen, and how much sense the text is making - and whether it’s saying what ‘you’ wanted it to say.

And that’s another puzzling thing: how you might start off writing consciously about something, with a set goal and structure in mind, and yet as you progress, and maybe let your mind wander, the words seem to start taking a direction of their own, and ‘you’ start to fade in and out of the picture, as if you are only a partially active participant - the guard rather than the driver of a train, maybe? There must be a better metaphor. Anyway, the thing is, you get into a kind of ‘flow state’, where the conscious mind starts to let go of the controls, and some of the stuff that’s always going on below consciousness gets the chance to express itself - and when you get out of the way something magical can sometimes happen. 

He’s experienced that flow state thing a few times. Sometimes it would be associated with a physical activity - like cycling, or sorting things in a warehouse; with cycling, there’s a stage when you’ve been riding for a while, when you stop feeling the effort of moving your legs and lose the sense of you muscles compressing and expanding, and of the joints twisting and articulating, and all that just happens on its own, and doesn’t register - and that’s when you start to feel that exhilarating sense of freedom, of your mind operating at a different level from the body…divorced from it almost, looking down at it doing its thing while enjoying the sense of being on a different plane. Likewise, when you’ve been doing a programming or writing task, or just some repetitive copying and pasting activity that involves a number of different windows and a range of different files/multiple activities, there’s a point when your brain has absorbed all of the steps, and worked out the most effective and flowing sequence - and that’s when it lets your conscious engagement start to drift away, and does all the motor work for you; in fact, it does it *more* efficiently, because you’ve taken the constant monitoring/judging apparatus out of the way, and you’re just letting the movements flow. 

Sometimes it’s just best to get out of the way.

This echoes a thought he had in the car earlier: the thought that when he plans things too much, or tries to think them through in too much detail, or to create a ‘perfect’ structure or approach, he more often than not seizes up, or fails to complete the thing. Too much thinking creates too much fear of failure, too many barriers - he erects walls of doubt that he can’t climb over…and so the idea dies, lost in a swamp of over-preparation - soggy procrastination drowning in its own perfection.

Sometimes, you just need to get on with it. 

He sees this at work a lot, and he finds it really frustrating: how people want to think through every aspect of a question in detail, seeking security in the over-analysis of things that can never be perfected; and all the while he knows that you need to come up with the model - the vague target form - and then set off to build it, modifying both your plan and the form as you go. 

Sometimes you just have to set out, even if you don’t know the final destination, or you will never start at all.

And he thinks that this is what this is all about, this 500-words-a-day habit; a way of enabling him to access the world of the flow state by sheer mechanical repetition.

Getting out of the way.

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