**Before we start…Some housekeeping updates: Lately, I’ve found Squarespace emails to be a huge barrier and cumbersome to use (there’s also no archiving system to look back to old newsletters) so I’ve switched to the Substack platform. This is why the appearance of the newsletter might look a bit different moving forward.**
Building from last week’s topic on metaphors, we use the word flow to describe a certain state we’re in. In his book, Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a whole chapter on the body. I thought I’d share some highlights from that chapter:
"Most people nowadays are aware of the importance of health and physical fitness. But the almost unlimited potential for enjoyment that the body offers often remains unexploited. Few learn to move with the grace of an acrobat, see with the fresh eye of an artist, feel the joy of an athlete who breaks his own record, taste with the subtlety of a connoisseur, or love with a skill that lifts sex into a form of art. Because these opportunities are easily within reach, the easiest step toward improving the quality of life consists in simply learning to control the body and its senses."
"Gioacchino Rossini, the composer of William Tell and many other operas, had a good grasp of the relationship between music and food: 'What love is to the heart, appetite is to the stomach. The stomach is the conductor that leads and livens up the great orchestra of our emotions.'"
"It is through the body that we are related to one another and to the rest of the world.”
"When left undeveloped, the senses give us chaotic information: an untrained body moves in random and clumsy ways, an insensitive eye presents ugly or uninteresting sights, the unmusical ear mainly hears jarring noises, the coarse palate knows only insipid tastes . If the functions of the body are left to atrophy, the quality of life becomes merely adequate, and for some even dismal. But if one takes control of what the body can do, and learns to impose order on physical sensations, entropy yields to a sense of enjoyable harmony in consciousness."
"However unimportant an athletic goal may appear to the outsider, it becomes a serious affair when performed with the intent of demonstrating a perfection of skill."
"...it should be stressed that the body does not produce flow merely by its movements. The mind is always involved as well . To get enjoyment from swimming, for instance, one needs to cultivate a set of appropriate skills, which requires the concentration of attention. Without the relevant thoughts, motives, and feelings it would be impossible to achieve the discipline necessary to learn to swim well enough to enjoy it."
I highly recommend the book.
Onto our weekly roundup. 👇
READ, WATCH, LISTEN ⤵
Watch: How To Find Your Flow
(Length: 7 minutes)
In this video, Steven Kotler brings up the “challenge-skills balance,” where we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. He also shares some “flow triggers” that can help you step into the flow a bit more intentionally.
“Flow actually feels 'flowy.' More specifically, it refers to any of those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. You're so focused on the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing, everything else just seems to disappear.”
Watch: The Swimmer
(Length: 2 minutes)
An excellent short film about a 90-year-old man who swims every day. This is the stuff that inspires me.
Project: The Floreio Project
In the slight chance that you haven’t come across this project, Antranik organizes the amazing resources Ido Portal has shared around the art of Floreio. “Our ultimate goal with the Floreio practice is to be able to flow freely on the ground, using our body and the space around us to create this physical expression.” -Ido Portal
As I learn more and more about Information Architecture (the art and science of structurally designing shared information environments) I appreciate the amount of time and effort that went into creating the original content by Ido, but also the energy put into organizing and structuring this compendium by Antranik.
Aesthetically Pleasing 👀
Muhammad Ali’s iconic photo is one of my all-time favorite photos. If you’re interested, click here for the full story behind this photo.
Tiny Insight 🧠
“You learn to swim by jumping into the water and swimming, not by sitting in a classroom studying aqua dynamic theory.” ~Jed McKenna
•••
To Fully Immersing Oneself,
Galo Alfredo Naranjo