Taking ourselves out of flow and into anxiety
The couch is ready for me—the remote just lying there ready for TV action. I can go watch a game, surf some channels, and chill out. I also have a tough book to read and a paper to write and maybe, instead of surfing and zoning out, I will put my head into this taxing book, then sit at a computer and try to write something coherent and original.
And so our days go—do we do the easy thing and and turn off any pressure about doing or learning, or, do we step one more time into the hard thing, the activity that demands some higher consciousness and sweat, and some anxiety along with it? We need both rest in its many forms (some more mindless than others) and intentional, outcome-involved activity. “How much of each?” is one issue we all address daily and in the bigger rhythms and cycles of work and life.
The question of when we commit ourselves to doing hard stuff in our lives is for all ages, though it is quite unavoidable when our set careers wind down. I am not writing here though, only for 55-plus year-olds, those not planning to take careers to another level and with the kids out of the house. Thirty and forty-somethings with careers, let alone kids, are mainly on blow and grow fast-track, but the question of choosing the hard stuff holds for all of us. When and why do I want to commit to the more difficult path?
I ask myself this as a new 64-year-old, with material needs little to none, with no need to push a career along or gain status—why should I take on a book, or anything hard and challenging for that matter? Specifically, what was I thinking when I got into a degree program to sweat on-line required courses and other stuff I don’t need? For you, it may have been a promotion, or the board role at church, or, if you are my son and daughter-in-law, why did we adopt the little boy from Bulgaria (or my other son, with a good teaching job, why is he back in a degree program?)
My answer is simple: I disrupt myself on purpose so I can renew my world view and remake myself. When I rattle my own cage successfully, when I put myself and my habits and world view at risk one more time, I give myself a chance to find and express new parts of me.
Like psychologist Mihalyi Csziksentmihalyi discovered in his work on flow states, let’s choose a high-skill challenge and make ourselves anxious, for the better. Let’s pick up the TV remote a little less often. Let’s smell the roses, and let’s plow some untilled soil that may or may not yield a flower or even one bud, but we become newer, sprouting inner buds, in the trying.
Enjoy yourself, love yourself, but don’t feel bad if you get tired of yourself. Remember Seinfeld when he signed off from his super-hit TV show and was on the talk shows endlessly. As the farewell went on too long, Jerry declared—“people are getting tired of me…I’m getting tired of me.” And so he and we move onto new things.
I wish self-tiring for all the talk show hosts who make fun of the other guys for one more show, after years of shows, without learning one thing from their opponent. I hope Mike Love of the Beach Boys gets to sing a new song, one that is hard and that he is not tired of singing. I hope our politicians tire of simple polarities and glib one-liners and allow themselves to be disrupted in their thinking while they conjure up new social imagination. I hope our teachers get worse at new teaching methods so they can eventually get better. I hope health care professionals defend less and dialogue more and find new ways out of this mess of system we have.
Conscious self-disruption: we do the hard things because we might discover more of who we are and can be.
photo above Some rights reserved by Taraji Blue