Category: Discussions/Essays

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” — Carl Jung, Psychologist

To live authentically is not easy. From the day we’re born till the day we die, we’re taught either explicitly or implicitly to follow rules — rules that are not our own. Of course, there are logical reasons for this; a young child knows not the game of survival nor the rules of engagement with the world around him. But we all know that our families, our governments and society in general are always demanding that we obey. But expectations breed both fear and greed, the twin desires that lead us to conflict. Thus it’s almost unreasonably difficult to find our true selves and ultimately, our destiny.

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” — Mark Twain, Writer

This is why we must write our own rules (visit my 10 Rules for Creative Living) and then adjust them as we develop greater understanding. To embark on this journey takes the trio of discipline, perseverance, and patience because the path to discover ourselves is the most difficult thing we can do. It also happens to be the most rewarding.

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.” — Silvia Plath, Poet.

There’s no easy answer or quick fix that can be found either here or elsewhere, but there are things to avoid. In my experience, there are a few caveats to beware of in a global society that is quickly growing more capitalistic and technological. To me, they are the greatest dangers to honest and authentic living and represent probably the most hostile yet most insidious obstacles to creativity. They are as follows:

1. Comfort
2. Convenience
3. Conformity

Challenging Comfort:

Clearly, we’re not talking about avoiding that chair that eases our back pain. Rather, we’re concerned about choices that side with familiarity and easy decision-making, the kind unopposed by fear and emotional discomfort. When we’re not challenged, we slide from control to complacency. We also begin to lose our ability to deal with distraction. Any and all kinds of information soon becomes hard to absorb or understand. Once susceptible to noise, both internal and external, we lose our ability to focus and pay real conscious attention to things. Our intended path begins to develop forks in the road, each one possibly leading us astray. This is highly erosive for the creative mind. Unable to deal with discomfort — which always come with the hardship of learning something new — we fall prey to chaos or those who profit from our attention. It’s not surprising that everywhere we go we see people preoccupied with devices or entertainment, incapable of dealing with quiet or solitude, unable to bear their own thoughts. This, our course, leads to inner emptiness, as we reformulate a mind no longer our own. For craftsmen, the danger lies in using formulas and tricks we know work — the dirty way out that stops us from growing and from reaching flow or optimal experience. Whether we give into distraction or escape from challenge, the descend towards psychic entropy begins. Take either route and we can pretty much forget about the concept of excellence because we’ll never develop the skill or mental fortitude to persevere through difficulty.

“For all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” — Baruch Spinoza, Philosopher

Confronting Convenience:

They say it’s always wise to be wary of that which has been presented to us on a silver platter. Those who want us to behave in the way they want always make it easy for us to do their bidding for them. Fast foods/services, cheap prices, and automation make it all too easy to abide. Shiny on the outside but empty on the inside, they prey on our laziness knowing we’re conditioned to immediacy. It may seem logical to save energy, time or money but the cheap and easy always comes with hidden costs. Corporations that require massive marketing/advertising campaigns to sell their goods and services work hard to give it all to us with easy access and low prices, so that we don’t bother to question the compromise in quality or whether the employees have been exploited or that the environment has been inadvertently harmed. How else can such monstrous profits be achieved with such poor products? Products which, if we were not familiar with the branding, we would never otherwise buy. Instead of going with the conveniences provided for us, we must instead try to see the big picture or at least make it more conducive to do the right things — things that enrich us and not merely provide us with short-term gratification. The very definition of the artist is one that makes the unusual choice, taking instead the original path KNOWING that it inconveniences him. The creative individual both strives for excellence within himself and in things he comes into contact with. He values quality over quantity, and real value over convenience.

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” — Martin Luther King, Jr., Minister & Activist

Countering Conformity:

It’s natural to conform. It’s biological and historically sensical to not abandon the tribe that protects us. But we no longer live in the tribal age confronted with the daily fear of hunger or death. Instead, our active desire to belong is purely social, to help us deal with the hardship of being alone. Unfortunately, this social need, when it’s obsessive easily becomes an impediment to true self-actualization. How can we be ourselves if we have to be like others? Searching from within is the only way to find our real talents, our real untainted desires that flow from both our spirit and our biology. This means dealing with solitude and sorting through the chaos of our own minds. Again, this is harder now than we can imagine. We have to dig out and dig thru the noise to find ourselves. And, in our day and age of increasing automation, we’re so used to following the trend that we don’t even choose for ourselves. We’ve outsourced not only our labour but our thinking. For instance, note how difficult it is to read or concentrate on something that is long, slow or hard to immediately understand. Soon, we might outsource most of our day-to-day decision-making. We already do so with simple things like buying books or choosing restaurants, consulting online the opinions of others instead of trusting or experiencing for ourselves actual reality. We have to be wary of what’s presented to us so alluringly. Sometimes, this even means avoiding the advice of friends or family. The company we keep matters. To do the right thing we need to derive our choices from within.

I work inside out, like nature.” — Jackson Pollock, Artist

In summary, all that can be said that matters is that we must work very hard to confront the forces that detour us from becoming our true selves. Only then, is there hope that we can live an honest, creative and original life. And what if we fail? So what. We mustn’t be scared of being true or of failing to become so.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” — Samuel Beckett, Writer.

“I would rather be dead than afraid.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Those who flow as life flows know they need no other force.” — Lao Tzu

When we hear the word flow we think of a kind of fluidity, one with power and grace, something that moves along so easily. It’s the kind of state of mind and body where things are in harmony and everything works. It’s both pleasurable in the present and enjoyably rewarding afterwards. Creatives and athletes alike often call it “being in the zone.”

In Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s brilliant book Flow, he discusses the power and beauty of being in such a state and how incredibly fulfilling it is to experience it. We’ve all been there at one time or another: we’re drawing/painting/animating and everything looks right and feels easy; we’re in the middle of the ball game and we feel like we can score at will; we’re working on a difficult task and yet the time flies by and we don’t notice any distractions nor do we feel hungry or tired; or, what normally feels fast and hurried slows down, and we can see/hear/taste with absolute clarity and precision as if we can control time and are at one with our environment. These are moments of being in flow. We all dream to achieve it and hope to fall into its chasm more often. We know it when we’re there and also when it ends.

“Attention shapes the self, and is in turn shaped by it.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow

The question then becomes why does flow occur and whether it can be experienced more often. Csikszentmihalyi says that flow, like anything else, can be practiced and its enablement more likely and more frequent under the right conditions. The key, it appears, lies in what has been discussed here often — the idea of attention or what he calls “consciousness as intentionally ordered information.” In other words, flow arrives not merely out of luck or chance, but by a prevalence of certain conditions, the most important being a mindset of fully conscious awareness.

As suspected, like happiness, flow is not something to be found or discovered (although the sudden awareness of its arrival might bring us to such a conclusion), but rather it is earned. Ultimately flow requires, as we can guess, sincere effort and concentration. And to do so, we must be guardians of what and how we take in data (stimuli).

“An individual can experience only so much. Therefore, the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it is, in fact, what determines the content and quality of life” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Most of the time, we spend our energy wastefully or at least unintentionally. That is, we do so without mindfulness. And in such state, our actions possess little in the way of focus, coordination or connection with the immediate environment or even the object in hand. All too often we drift along half listening to someone as we glance at our phones or casually watch tv while cooking or eating our meals. As such, the attention and care we give to any activity is not only sporadic but also passive. In fact, it’s so passive that the time passes by without consciousness — an experience empty of meaning. The time spent loses all value. In the business or economic sense, this transaction, which costs labour and time, has produced a loss. In the scenario of watching TV during dinner, we neither fully enjoy the viewing nor the sensations that come with the cooking or consumption of our meal. Or, in the case of our smart phone obsessiveness, we’re in the presence of others, but are absent of any significant connection. The actions taken produce neither tangible experience worth remembering or a product worth consuming.

But when we align our concentration singularly, we at least put ourselves up to the challenge of attaining optimal experience. But to arrive at flow, a certain sufficiency of skill is required. Only then, when our challenges are met in alignment at or just above our current skill levels, can we accomplish that because as we rise to the level of our challenges — raising the level of complexity involved — we experience growth. The further beauty of this is that not only does it present the possibility of endless growth, but we can start from anywhere. We need not be a master or top flight professional to experience flow. We need only to place our desires in order (goals) and take action in a fully attentive manner.

“The shape and content of life depend on how attention has been used.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

We can see now that sliding towards the side of insufficiency in terms of ability is a dangerous place to be. In any economic or social system, to be low-skilled raises the odds of anxiety, worry or apathy — all of which lead to deep unhappiness and, if left unalleviated for too long, psychological disorder. It is why, both in this blog, and in my actions as a teacher, I stress vehemently the importance of raising one’s abilities — skill is crucial. It’s not safe to be a weak-legged or lazy gazelle in the wild, nor is it a happy existence. When we have skill, we can exercise both effectiveness and efficiency.

On the other hand, higher skill, when met only with tasks too easy, lead to boredom. Taking the safe and easy way out, results in this. And like in the wild, indifference and excessive comfort makes us weak, if not less than inspiring. One can see, from analyzing Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow chart, that it wouldn’t be hard to slide from control to boredom very easily. And, with time, skills deteriorate without practice and we fall into those other ugly categories — a likely scenario given society is constantly moving forward (given growing competition and growing populations). Things grow or die. Our aim, both as artists and humans, is to keep growing. This doesn’t necessarily mean advancements in wealth, status or even productivity, but rather it’s a matter of mind and presence that we keep learning to find purpose in our journey.

“I live in a landscape, which every single day of my life is enriching.” — Daniel Day-Lewis, Actor

What’s most important to realize in all this is that much of our happiness relies more on how we do something rather than what we do. As stated here often, our approach to our tasks at hands alters the mindset and experience. Csikszentmihalyi calls this having an autotelic character.

According to his book, Csikszentmihalyi describes that “the autotelic personality is an individual who generally does things for their own sake, in the “here and now” rather than for some later goal. In other words, their mindset is such that they don’t get involved with anything outside of the activity they’re doing and are measurably happy when they’re engaged in it. They are, in a sense, fully mindful, attentive, and yet personally detatched from any expectations or outcomes. They’re completely committed to the process and nothing else.

“Enjoyment is characterized by forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Yes, some people seem to be in the right conditions more often (i.e. wealth and privilege to do what they want), or even have a predisposition, either genetically or from their social upbringing to be more likely to possess an autotelic trait. But for the most part, both Csikszentmihalyi and I believe, that developing an autotelic approach to life is not only possible but essential for raising the frequency for the enjoyment of life. In fact, studies have shown that those who benefit from extensive material possession and easy access often find only pleasure and not enjoyment which isn’t, even if it’s often mistaken for, the same thing. (To know the difference we only need to ask ourselves how memorable or fulfilling the experience is after the event is over.) In fact, privilege might even be an impediment to growth and learning because creativity and effort isn’t required.

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven” – Matthew 19:24, The New Testament

I’ve always contended, especially to those who have studied under my tutelage, that if we can create joy from even the most mundane activities in the doing of our craft and even the many seemingly minor acts of our daily lives, then a sense of worthiness can arise from our efforts. Time and energy then, is no longer wasted. Each activity, or at least more activities more often, begin to have meaning. And as such, the game of life can become one that is very pleasurable to play.

“Flowing water never goes stale.” — Taoist proverb