What We Enjoy

 

happiness is not:

perfection, control or determined

by external events and people.

happiness is:

a product of your perception and

inner balance. When you define your

own energy, you bring your harmony

with you wherever you go.

 — yung pueblo

The Clock in the Storm

“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

And to think that Stevenson lived in the 19th century, not the 21st. I have long maintained that mindfulness practice is a necessary antidote to the digital age’s unabated assault on our attention and ability to focus.

Beyond Reward and Punishment

“To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments,” wrote Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

“To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances. This challenge is both easier and more difficult than it sounds: easier because the ability to do so is entirely within each person’s hands; difficult because it requires a discipline and perseverance that are relatively rare in any era, and perhaps especially in the present.”

Experiencing the Autotelic

“The term autotelic derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is not done with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward. 

“Playing the stock market in order to make money is not an autotelic experience; but playing it in order to prove one’s skill at forecasting future trends is — even though the outcome in terms of dollars and sense is exactly the same. 

“Teaching children in order to turn them into good citizens is not autotelic, whereas teaching them because one enjoys interacting with children is. 

“What transpires in the two situations is ostensibly identical; what differs is that when the experience is autotelic, the person is paying attention to the activity for its own sake; when it is not, the attention is focused on the consequences.”

— Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“Csíkszentmihályi interviewed artists and musicians in order to understand what flow felt like,” Robert Genn noted. “Their reports — 7000 of them — were staggeringly similar: each described a feeling of total immersion and intrinsic enjoyment, a loss of a sense of time and other needs, and an almost out-of-body experience, where the activity was automatic, without much conscious effort. Think of a clarinetist observing her own fingers, letting the instrument play itself.

“The most important thing about flow is that it only happens when a person is nestled in a psychological state between challenge and control; immersed in an activity with which she already possesses a fair amount of skill and evolved technique. One cannot lose herself in a concerto, after all, until she has long practiced her scales.”

Csíkszentmihályi noted, “Some things we are initially forced to do against our will turn out in the course of time to be intrinsically rewarding.”

What Survivors Have in Common

The Hungarian-born psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Me-high Cheek-sent-me-high) regards this trait as a key element of the autotelic personality — those internally driven people who have a tendency to engage in an activity for its own sake.

Those who have an autotelic personality are said to experience less stress during their complete absorption in an activity, the state he called “flow.”

Finding the Freedom of Flow

Flow: “The state of concentration and engagement that can be achieved when completing a task that challenges one's skills. The theory was formulated when Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed dozens of experts, from composers and artists to tradesmen and chefs.”

In his book Awakening Your Ikigai, Ken Mogi wrote, “Csikszentmihalyi testifies that one source of inspiration for his  work on flow came when he observed a painter friend working on his artwork for hours on end, without any prospect of selling the work or getting financial reward for it. This particular state of mind, or work ethic, where you just immerse yourself in the joy of being in the her and now, without asking for immediate reward or recognition, is an integral part of the Japanese concept of Ikigai.”

“Ikigai” is a Japanese word that translates as a raison d'être, a reason to get up in the morning.