Flow

I sat down to read a book with Errol the other day. Errol is a full body reader. His reads with his whole body. I’ve never seen anyone happier to read (or, really, happier to do anything). Errol’s body shivers with excitement and he starts to flail his little arms when I get out a book (he especially loves Middlemarch)! There is no confusion about whether Errol is happy or not.

But why is he so happy?

Is it just chemical?
Does our knowledge of time (which he doesn’t share) make us unhappy (always counting down….)?
Is he happy because he doesn’t know he will die?
Is it because he only knows the moment?
If we are very lucky, sometimes, ever so rarely, we enter into an action that is so fulfilling, so engrossing that we lose ourselves, lose track of time. This is called many names by many people. I’ll call it flow. Sometimes it is the sublime that takes me into flow (Chopin’s Etudes, a mountain walk), other times it is the most quotidian of things (washing the dishes, cutting garlic), and I am gone. It is as if I have stepped outside of myself and of time and into the river of eternity for just a moment, and then I am returned to myself and the oppression of time. Errol lives, mostly, in that flow. We envy him for it and are grateful to him for bringing us along to that sacred moment.