A sunday night, after travel and mundane work the entire week and in the daytime, I thought to myself about what I am truly doing in my life. I always do this every day but this time I paid greater attention and emotion to it so I could actually think and process this properly, because something was off. I feel fleeting moments of joy in a day, when we have twenty four hours a day. I know what some people might say; “all emotions are equally important, one should experience them wholly” and I agree; but I WANT joy to be greater because I like that feeling. I feel that if happiness is not my predominant state, what the hell does my life even mean?
I have been on this journey of looking for passion, so I have tried two methods: searching and creating. Now, creating is a damn artificial way of being passionate and it does NOT work with me because I just can’t make this feeling up that I love something, just the way unrequited love is rejected by the focus of it, simply because he/she does not feel that love and cannot make it up on the spot. So searching remained, and searching entails an intricate and arduous process of, you guessed it, searching. Trying new things and not just trying, going deeper into them but if it is not your thing, move on. To go deeper into them means exploration and attachment, with which come the pains of failure. I know I sound like a prickly (not to mention lazy) arse, but I don’t like it when life doesn’t go my way. But that also means I do not make it a point to engineer it my way, thanks to something called fear.
Fear, for me, is a limitation. A prison. A boundary. A self preservation mechanism built in us by nature for survival purposes so we overuse it and cage ourselves in a “comfort zone”. To be honest, this confort zone might even cause more inconvenience than comfort because majority times what lies beyond our fear is something greater than comfort. I like to call that ecstasy; the thrill of breaking limitations and this is what I think I am looking for. I may even be entirely wrong and either I may not know what I am looking for or it is something different altogether but for now, I will stick with the ecstasy construct. The thrill of going beyond routine and entering novelty might just be what makes life worth living for.
So there is routine, fear being the wall in between and novelty being the other side. The question is, do we have the courage to jump over that wall? (or break, your preference) What has been the case up until now is that I have never worked up a feeling, the adrenaline in our analogy, to jump over the wall. It may be courage but I think it is just strong, intense desire. More often than not, the success stories of our world have this but with so much more intensity that it burns. When it burns hot, so hot that it consumes the bearer, that is when the deed is done. Because that is what flow science is about.
Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined the term flow in (I am not a research article) A.D. when he started exploring how high performance occurs in miaculous cases of high risk events. It most often happens with adventure sports players because it is literally a ‘do or die’ situation where the player either accomplishes the feat or gets splattered by falling from the height of a peak to the mountainside. Turns out that it is not just adrenaline in such cases but anandamine, norepinephrine and two other chemicals that I have forgotten (pardon me, my ardent readers…) which enable the possibility of such feats. Let me tell you, that dose of five chemicals definitely gives you a greater kick than most chemicals, which makes the flow state highly addictive. Besides that, I am pretty sure if not flow, some regular anandamine (happy hormone) and endorphins would be pretty useful for someone looking for happiness.
We have two places, a wall, adrenaline, oh wait…. I forgot a crucial detail. In most cases with me, the fear is purely psychological. That is what bothers me the most. I create the hurdle and I try to cross it, but wouldn’t it be helpful just to remove it? Fear is psychological, so forgetting it would, simplistically (like a fool), be the solution, giving us a hint that fear has the base of memory to it. Unfortunately, we are stuck to memory quite rigidly, so fear feeds off of us. For once, if we just set our past aside, completely centre our awareness and attention to the moment in which we exist (zen schtick), then we can surpass fear and move to greater heights!
That, is where I am stuck. Theory is clear, application needs work; and it is driving me crazy. I want to go beyond, but I let the fear get the better of me. The mindscape also presents physical manifestations in certain situations like anxiety. The worse part is that the longer I stay in the pit of routine and old, the more meaningless my life feels. Just expressing these thoughts was blocked by a great fear of mine so I restricted myself from relating any live experiences, so I took a very small step. This brinngs to my attention that I have a long way to go. (rant over: sadboi hours completed)
Pursuit of Something 