Way back at good old Saint Mary's grade school on the shores of Lake Erie, I was deep into my sixth-grade year. My homeroom teacher, and science teacher, Mr. Kirst, was a bit of a Renaissance Man, both a science guy and an art guy. He gave out awards to each of his students. Each award was a ball-point pen drawing of a character from the Peanuts comic strip. They were all goofy, sarcastic awards. Having terrible handwriting (the worst cursive you could imagine), I won the award for best handwriting. The award was an image of Charlie Brown hunched over his desk, biting his tongue out the corner of his mouth, writing Dear Mom. I think I still have this somewhere in my piles of ephemera.
Mr. Kirst was a role model for me in many ways, not the least of which he catalyzed my love of science.
I went to Cardinal Mindszenty High School. Cardinal Jószef Mindszenty opposed communist persecution in his native Hungary and was subsequently tortured. He visited our school in 1974, and I was honored to have been there for the celebration of his arrival.
Mr. Burns was my Mechanical Drawing teacher in my Junior year. Through this class, I learned the satisfaction you get from creating drawings by hand. It was one of my first experiences with flow. I loved lettering with a sharp pencil. Ironic that I became a much improved writer with another science teacher. Granted, it was only lettering. I still stink at cursive.
I can still get into a flow state when I am writing by hand. When in flow, I lose my sense of self. My consciousness is attuned solely to the task at hand. Imagine if you could call on that as a superpower; to flick the switch and go into flow.
In a flow state, we move from chaos to order.
As an engineering student, I first heard of the term "Entropy." Here it is defined as a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system's thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system; the second law of thermodynamics says entropy always increases with time. In the science of human behavior, entropy is the disorder and randomness of our lives. It is the inevitable chaos that can always raise its head at any moment. Unchecked, chaos in our lives will grow with time.
The concentration of the flow experience - together with clear goals and immediate feedback - provides order to consciousness, inducing the enjoyable condition of psychic Negentropy. We lose our self-consciousness to the moment. We focus solely on one thing. There is no state of being that is better than this, for it is through this doorway of Negentropy that flow is established and leads to joy and deep levels of engagement and love of life.
As Mihaly Csikszentmihaly wrote, “we have seen earlier when an activity is thoroughly engrossing; there is not enough attention left over to allow a person to consider either the past or the future, or any other temporarily irrelevant stimuli. One item that disappears from awareness deserves special mention because, in normal life, we spend so much time thinking about it; our own self. Here is a climber describing this aspect of the experience ‘It's a Zen feeling, like meditation or concentration. One thing you're after is the one-pointedness of mind. You can get your ego mixed up with climbing in various ways, and it isn't necessarily enlightening. But when things become automatic, it's like an egoless thing in the way. Somehow the right thing is done without you ever thinking about it or doing anything at all. It just happens.’"
Hmm. I've just this moment sensed a bit of synchronicity. As I wrote the name "Csikszentmihaly," I realized that both he and Joszef Mindszenty have similar unique spellings; SZENT. They are both Hungarian. Funny that I should connect them in this way.
Be well, dear reader.
