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Book Review
Finding Flow
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Toward a richer life
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's 1997 book Finding Flow
opens with a quote from W. H. Auden:
If we really want to live, we'd better start at once
to try;
If we don't, it doesn't matter, but we'd better start
to die.
Learning to live a richer, more rewarding life is the
subject of Finding Flow, and much of what Csikszentmihalyi has
to say relates to how we view our roles as educators.
As Csikszentmihalyi writes in his first chapter, "The
Structures of Everyday Life,"
The choice is simple: between now and the inevitable
end of our days, we can choose either to live or to die....But to live
in the sense [Auden] means it is by no means something that will happen
by itself.... if we don't take charge of its direction, our life will
be controlled by the outside to serve the purpose of some other agency....We
cannot expect anyone to help us live; we must discover how to do it by
ourselves. (2)
Finding Flow is written to help us do that: manage
our lives to gain maximum satisfaction and benefit from our experiences,
whatever they are.
The quality of life
According to Csikszentmihalyi, the quality of our lives
is determined by the content of our experiences. But the problem is that
people find value in all kinds of experiences. Activities which some people
find boring and limiting other people find rich and fulfilling. Csikszentmihalyi's
conclusion, which echoes the insights of the great teachers of Eastern
philosophies, is that the quality of our lives is determined not so much
what we experience but by how we experience it.
Csikszentmihalyi makes the point that it is how we order
experience that is important. This order, the pattern of understanding
that we impose on experience, manifests itself in habitual actions, emotions,
and choices. That ordering process and the resulting perceptions and behavior
eventually become recognizable as our "self."
Our goal is to enhance our ability to create order by
improving the quality of our attention (the "psychic energy" we invest
in experiences). By learning to concentrate, we learn to control this
psychic energy, and thus our ability to think.
The "flow" experience
One of the most important concepts Csikszentmihalyi discusses
is "flow." Flow experiences occur when high skills meet high challenges
and our self-awareness dissolves. We and the challenge become a single
process, "happening" together in "effortless action." The "flow experiences"
provide the highest quality moments in our lives.
Csikszentmihalyi's discussion of flow experiences and
their relationship to learning, self-esteem and growth could provide valuable
insights for both educators and parents. One implication is that we should
focus as much on teaching students how to relate to the challenges as
we work to prepare students to meet challenges.
Engineering activity for growth
Csikszentmihalyi writes that the first step to gain the
maximum satisfaction and growth from our lives is "engineering daily activities
so that one gets the most rewarding experiences from them." This means,
in part, determining which activities produce positive, fulfilling results
and which do not, and then increasing the frequency of positive activities
and decreasing the frequency of the negative ones.
Applying this concept to work, Csikszentmihalyi writes,
"It is not the external conditions that determine how much work will contribute
to the excellence of one's life. It is how one works, and what experiences
one is able to derive from confronting its challenges." We don't necessarily
need to find new job to feel more satisfaction; we must reframe how we
look at our current job and then change how we do it.
This insight struck me as especially important for educators.
We spend a great deal of time preparing our students for work and careers
but very little time helping them learn to relate to that work so that
it adds to the quality of their lives. Perhaps if we helped our students
learn how to turn even work they dislike into positive experiences, they
would realize that is not so much what they are doing that provides satisfaction,
but how they are doing it.
In his discussion of the risks and opportunities of leisure
time, Csikszentmihalyi notes that we often use stimulation to block from
our consciousness the sources of anxiety and discontent. These stimulations,
which can include television, formula fiction, gambling, and drug and
alcohol abuse. They may temporarily reduce the chaos we feel in our consciousness,
but "the only residue they leave behind is a feeling of listless dissatisfaction."
He writes, "The record seems to suggest that a society
begins to rely heavily on leisure--and especially on passive leisure--only
when it has become incapable of offering meaningful, productive occupation
to its members." He has observed that people will devote more time to
leisure and seek increasingly more elaborate artificial stimulation.
Making the changes
Finding Flow concludes by exploring the changes
needed to derive meaningful, positive benefits from all experiences, including
handling time stress, dealing with suffering, and enhancing the "feedback
loop" between concentration and interest
Csikszentmihalyi's last chapter, "Love of Fate," was
one of the most significant for me. Among a number of important philosophical
concepts, he discusses how to find harmony in the varied and conflicting
nature of everyday experience. Here he refers specifically to the concept
of "amor fati" (love of fate) as expressed by Frederich Nietzsche, Abraham
Maslow, and Carl Rogers. "The quality of life is much improved," he writes,
"if we learn to love what we have to do."
If, as educators, we are truly concerned about helping
our students not just cope with the working world, but to live a full,
satisfying, human life in a culture which is dominated by speed and technology,
we should consider the concepts presented in Finding Flow. It is an excellent
book for anyone suffering what Csikszentmihalyi calls "psychic entropy"
or who wants to enhance the quality of life. I especially recommend it
to teachers who find themselves increasingly at odds with an educational
system which often seems more concerned with producing cogs in the capitalistic
machine than in educating human beings.
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