Flow

I listened to "This American Life" today. David Rakoff had a wonderful piece on the psychological concept of "flow". This is an idea articulated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that describes a human state of concentration where time falls away. David Rakoff, it turns out loves doing crafts as an avocation because he can lose himself in the flow experience. So, he visits the craft department at Martha Stuart's Living, the center of all things crafts. The people who work there recognize the state of concentration he describes, but, it turns out, it is a bit harder to achieve when it is scheduled; when it is work.

I was trying to remember the last time I felt that sense of flow in my work. Certainly I have felt it, though, only irregularly, at best. The thing is that the work of programming, all the mythology of the software field, is all built around flow. Deep in the mythology of every important programming language, operating system, or paradigm shifting applications are stories of working programs emerging from the smallest seed of an idea after a night of concentrated coding. These are programs that changed not only my profession, but defined our time.

It is impossible for me to imagine myself so lost in concentration on some software problem that I would lose track of time, that the lines would pour out from my fingers, beautiful and perfect. It happened only rarely before. It will never happen again. Am I too old? Is it this damned repetitive stress pain? Is it because of the corrupting influence of the paycheck?

Alternatively, does it need to flow? Does it have to be a zen experience? Can it be hard, slow, and painful and still mean something? Does it mean more as work that it is written as if a spirit has a hold of your keyboard or does it mean more that you can predict the weather from the pain in your joints?

(Image, by Abangmanuk, is a canghul, an Indonesian hoe. It is from wikicommons. Image is in the public domain.)

-- J