by Neil Elliot
I don't really want to review and recommend this book. What I want to recommend is the earlier "Between boredom and anxiety" but it's $50, and it's probably too academic for most. So why bother at all? Because you need to read about flow. You've heard about flow, about being in "the zone," about that balanced and focused state of being. In fact you've probably been there, maybe even in church! Csikszentmihalyi (what a name) is the guy who analyzed flow, wrote about it, and then made a career out of it.
You need to read about flow, because finding and maximizing flow experiences in your life will improve it. Whether it's through gardening, playing chess, dancing, snowboarding, or attending church. Flow is about being completely focused on an activity you do for it's own sake, an activity you are competent in and in which you have control. Flow is, to use other terminology, about living life intentionally. It has application to every aspect of life. It is certainly a spiritual discipline, although not a harsh one.
"Flow..." is the non-academic book about the flow experience, first published in 1990. For all Csikszentmihalyi's protests that this is not a self-help book, that's exactly what it is. It comes complete with easy, uplifting chapter headings, lots of little vignettes, and the promise that this book will make you happy — forever (almost). It introduces the main concepts of flow and then applies them in various aspects of life — thought, work, the body. It deals with relationships and the chaos of life and with finding meaning. In other words it covers all the bases that a good self-help book should. Csikszentmihalyi inevitably brings in the usual smorgasbord of religions and spiritualities, for this cannot escape its genre. But in spite of these generic failures, the book is worth reading because the main content is here.
The key concept is the "autotelic self" — the approach which values life for its own sake, not for what we can get out of it. This is taking life as gift, not as a right, nor as a resource. This is childish life, life as play. This is how (practically) we live life in all its fullness. It is an approach, which I believe to be complementary to the life of faith.
Faith and flow inform each other. Flow and faith complement each other. Flow is the result of recognizing the presence of God's spirit all around us. Flow is what happens when holiness overtakes us. And you can come at it from either end. Take flow seriously and you will be drawn into the spiritual, (as Csikszentmihalyi shows in his later chapters). Take spirituality seriously and you will be drawn into flow.
Flow may better be described as the psychology of spiritual experience, and this book will help you stay there.
