Right now I wish that I could go back to elementary school art class. I would literally just love to create all day long. I have fond memories of learning and doing tye-dye outside for the very first time. We scrunched up and folded our t-shirts and wrapped them with rubber bands and dipped them into the buckets of dye. It was so fun to unravel the t-shirt and see the amazing design that appeared!
While I can do art any time I want, I just don’t have the time, any time I want. Does this sound familiar? And then there is the gathering of all the materials, setting it up, creating and then cleaning up. I really don’t recall any of that as a kid, in fact, I think my art teaching must have been a magician or even super woman!
So how can I create the things I wish existed?
What was really happening during that time was not so much the art that was created, but the experience and some sort of magical peaceful feeling. It was as if there was no time, in fact, it also felt as if there wasn’t even any other kids. Even writing, although my 6th grade teacher told me that I would never be a writer, but we won’t go there.
It is hard to explain, but in all my years of doing art I wasn’t really doing art for the actual thing that I was creating. Well sometimes I was, but most of the time I was seeking that feeling that I had while I was actually creating. Even to this day I doodle. It is relaxing and my mind just goes off somewhere and when I come back it is always interesting to see what I actually created.
I now know that it is called Flow. I was in some sort of a flow state. A timeless, stressless, free flowing way of being. Fortunately, a guy by the name of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
According to Amazon: “Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s famous investigations of “optimal experience” have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness and greatly improve the quality of our lives.”
This is really the thing I want to create.