Remember this song?
“Goin’ up to the spirit in the sky (Spirit in the sky)
That’s where I’m gonna go when I die (When I die)
When I die and they lay me to rest
I’m gonna go to the place that’s the best.”
Well, maybe you don’t need to wait til you die to experience ‘the place that’s the best’. Maybe it exists right here, right now, in the ‘flow’.
I’m fascinated by the concept of “flow” as outlined in the classic book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi .
Flow is something we can all potentially access. Erik Weihenmayer experienced “flow” kayaking the Colorado River. He wrote:
“Climbing was more about bringing yourself forth, asserting your will over an extreme, inhospitable environment. Yet trying to apply that learning to rivers had failed. Perhaps, the secrets of a river were not revealed by trying to exert the ego over it, but rather by letting go and allowing the river to consume you, all the way down to the core, by simply giving in to the unknowable and writing music you would never hear. By surrendering, it allowed the river to erode everything and wash away the crust, until there was nothing left but that inner light. . . Unencumbered, that light was free to flow out and fuse with the landscape, with the energy of the unstoppable river. Maybe this was as close as we could ever get to understanding, just a brief portal flash of that light connecting with something bigger, something mysterious and infinite.”
I often gained access to this dimension while flying my sailplane. And I write about flow in my book “Bump In The Road: 15 Stories of Courage, Hope and Resilience”.
“Flow can be experienced anywhere, any time. It’s about exploring the depths of our creativity in a timeless space created by our own awareness. It’s about both inhabiting the present and the eternal simultaneously.
Flow is an experience, a state of mind, and a state of being.”
Flow is a timeless state, where time seems to slow. It’s an amazing experience I would wish for everyone. Here is an audio excerpt from my book about one flow experience:
Flow. It’s available to all of us. May you go with the flow.
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