I’m going to try something where I do my usual rant about my creative process but leave it out of the final piece. The final peace. Death is the final peace. But there are many little peaces to be had along the way. Sleep.

In a previous post, how we fall apart, I wrote about how groups of people– organizations, communities, even friend groups– struggle to ‘keep it together’. The essential idea is that there’s a ‘goldilocks zone’, the ‘healthy danger’ zone, and it’s hard to stay there for long– first of all because there are always forces pushing and pulling us away from the zone, but perhaps more importantly, because it’s hard not to overreact or underreact to these forces. As a result we get either ruinous conflict or stale blandness. We run too hot or too cold. It’s hard to stay in the zone.

Today I’m reflecting on how all of this mirrors Mihaly C’s flow state, the space between anxiety and boredom, when you’re being challenged at the edge of your abilities, but not more and not less. 

This is NOT going to be an instructional post where I talk about how you can access flow, because heaven knows I’ve been aware of the concept for 15+ years, and yet I’ve never been very good at accessing flow on purpose. I definitely have accessed it; I’d say most of my best writing was produced in a state of flow, and it was almost always accessed unintentionally. 

Which makes me ask myself: have I ever actually achieved flow on purpose, even once? Can I think of a single occasion where I said “alright, I’m going to access the flow state now”, or even “I’m going to get into flow today”? Depressingly, I can’t think of an example. Surely there must be SOME instance in the past THIRTY YEARS of my life where I sat down to do something and actually did it? It… really doesn’t feel like it. I know I’ve written many twitter threads in a state of flow– hundreds of them– but as far as I can remember, every single one of them was ad-hoc, off-the-cuff, unplanned, improvised on the fly. 

So maybe the best thing I can do is to set aside more time to improvise? But even that might possibly be somewhat fraught, because it’s possible that when I set that intention, some other part of me flinches, and feels the weight of expectation, and then gets too anxious to be in flow.

I find myself laughing. Am I really so capricious, so fickle? I think the truth is yes, and then I’ve obscured the truth of this to myself, because I find it quite embarrassing to be so fickle. So fragile, in a sense. Like an avocado or a banana that seems to go brown when you take your eyes off of it for a few seconds. I suppose I wish I were honey, which lasts forever, or maybe an apple or an orange, which can sit happily in a fridge for months. But no, I’m a banana.