Mono: How to find flow in the everyday

The other day my workmates and I fell into one of those conversations where we reminisced about ‘what we did during Covid’. I won’t bore you with my own recollections, other than to say that I had surplus time on hands and, having dabbled in mindfulness for a while, decided to set myself a challenge: three hours meditation a day for ten days in a row (with breaks obviously). Why go to some misty mountain retreat when I could do my very own zen retreat - a sesshin - at home? 

I finished my ten-days, which wasn’t especially difficult, and felt good about it, but I can’t say that at any point I achieved the elusive state of mushin, or ‘no-mind’; I did not break through to the Dharma and was nowhere near the gates of Satori. The mental chatter never really died down: I looked forward to my next coffee break, I had irritating tunes in my head, I thought about taking a photo of myself and posting it online, my knees ached, and so on. 

That said, I looked forward to the daily time spent actively doing nothing. It was preferable to that make-the-most-of-your-time, productivity guilt instilled in us by the work ethic, capitalism and impending mortality. But even if I had achieved some kind of enlightenment, how would I have carried it over into daily, post-lockdown life? As the old Zen phrase goes: ‘Before enlightenment, washing clothes and chopping wood; after enlightenment, washing clothes and chopping wood.’     

The reality is that we are always having to do something, and this makes it hard to find that elusive zone where the mental chatter settles like sediment and our thoughts are as clear as an unmuddied lake. It’s tricky enough clearing the mind when we’re sitting doing nothing, let alone when we’re on the hamster-wheel of life.

But then I heard about the flow state, that almost mythical state of effortless activity where we are 100% in the moment, completely absorbed, where time flows smoothly and you’re not doing the activity… you are it! Better still, this state can be attained when we’re actually doing stuff. No need to sit alone in isolation for weeks at a time, or give up your job, or relationships or worldly possessions. 

If the literature on it is anything to go by, the flow state apparently happens when we are doing something challenging but just on the edge of doable; like surfing, mountaineering, learning a new skill, creating art and so on. Admittedly, not the most accessible of activities. In fact, in the real world few of us have the time, organisational flair, resources or lack of responsibility to be swanning off into the wild, spending our days in a studio and so forth. 

Life mainly consists of extended periods of doing the same thing we do all the time, interspersed with bouts of un-doable stressful challenges, distractions, and vast reams of admin; activities which manage to be both tedious and unimportant yet urgent and unavoidable at the same time. It is as if modern life takes away any meaningful flow-like activity, then sells the promise of it back to us - usually in adverts depicting a group of good-looking friends driving through a rocky wilderness in a jeep.

The search for the flow state often leads people to partake of endurance challenges, based on the observation that by pushing their bodies and minds to extremes people often report breaking through to the other side. However, having read a few books by people who have tried this - and even participated in the odd endurance event myself - this state seems to escape you the harder you look for it. The search for flow through exhaustion and hardship leads more often than not to just exhaustion and hardship.

I think there are a few reasons why this approach doesn’t usually work. One is that the premise that effort leads to results is dubious anyway, or at least, it depends on the result you’re after. An activity enjoyed for its own sake is already its own kind of flow. But if it’s hard work in order to ‘step up’ to some next level, then work just leads to more work, because I need to keep up the effort to stay up there. Trying to quiet the mind through activity in this way is like mentally arm-wrestling against yourself: the harder you push, the harder you resist. 

If the effort is being expended in order to be some-one or somewhere else, then the very aim of being in the moment is defeated. Then, we might end up using or even punishing our bodies in order to find a mental state that can only be found by going in the other direction; by listening to our bodies and doing what makes us happy. 

Finally, nothing is more likely to prevent me from being in the moment than trying to get into it. The moment is like that; the harder you grab it the faster it slips from your grasp like a bar of soap. Perhaps the real issue is that we feel the need to try and get rid of thinking, whereas if we organise our activity in such a way, then the thinking will naturally fall into line and synchronise with what we’re doing.

Usually the most important lessons come when we’re not looking for them. For me it was when I was having one of those joyless days at work with an exponential to-do list and continual interruptions, where you feel like you’re being forced into the corner of a room and poked with sharpened sticks by an ever growing crowd of people. I was overwhelmed and getting more so by the minute. 

Then a rare thing happened: I got some good advice. A senior colleague told me just to do the most important thing on my list, get it finished, draw a line under it and then move onto the next thing. I looked at my nightmarish to-do list. Impossible! But I did it anyway and, bit by bit, the mist started to clear; the list grew shorter, the crowd of people poking me seemed to thin out a little. I was chopping away at my tasks one by one. It felt good. Was I…in the flow? 

Not quite. After all, I was at work and that only ever gets so good. But I was doing the next best thing: I was monotasking. Monotasking is less glamorous than flow, but it is more affordable and durable. It’ll do just as well, and you don’t have to climb up a mountain, run an ultramarathon, practice the piano or meditate for 10,000 hours to find it. You can monotask anywhere, anytime and no special skills are required. You just do what you’re doing, finish it, then do the next thing. 

Ah, but when do we know that we have finished? Well, that’s a discussion for another day but we’ll finish with a second piece of good advice (from Bauhaus typographer Erik Spiekermann): ‘Better done than perfect’.