Flow

"Flow occurs when the challenges you face perfectly mesh with your abilities to meet them. When you recognize that these abilities include not merely your talents but your strengths and virtues, the implications for what work to choose or how to recraft them become clear." - 'Authentic Happiness' - Martin Seligman

Moments of flow are awesome. It is not the same as gorging yourself with your favourite Lindt chocolate, sitting watching your favourite episode of Friends, or sleeping in with no reason to get out of bed. There are lots of things that can make us smile... but finding the things you are great at, and trying to include them in what you do every day is definitely worth fighting for.

Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi ("cheeks sent me high") came up with the concept of Flow, and writes about it in "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience". I haven't read that yet... but first heard of the concept in his TED talk. In Seligman's book, he is discussing the concept more fully. In addition, along with others, he has gone through Aristotle and Plato, Aquinas and Augustine, the Old Testament and the Talmud, Confuscious, Buddha, Lao-Tze, Bushido (the samurai code), the Koran, Benjamin Franklin, and the Upanishads, and other texts to come up with the core characteristics endorsed by almost all religious and philosophical traditions. Their list:

• Wisdom
• Courage
• Love and humanity
• Justice
• Temperance
• Spirituality and transcendence
  

Interesting how much commonality there is when you strip away 'the cover'. I particularly enjoy the idea of being able to work towards common ideas of what society should strive for without the baggage.

I enjoy that even more when the idea is based on finding what people's strengths are and working towards developing those.

Exciting Times.