Faux Flow
Recently, I experienced a flow state, but with a catch: not all flow states are created equal.
It was tax season, so I was muddling through a year of accounting as I reconciled our books. Santosha: we are small but mighty (and sometimes, our books are filled with such mishegoss, I want to throw my laptop out the attic window and sail off into the sunset). I try to practice gratitude: thank goodness for all these tiny transactions that make our moonshot project possible. Thank goodness that we have the funds (read: soul-crushing debt) to build it. Thank goodness for the slick accounting software that helps us stay organized.
And yet: I spent FOUR.FULL.DAYS solving mysteries in our books (and I’m not done yet). The software didn’t import certain transactions, leaving miniscule holes everywhere, making ornate lace out of diligently maintained records. Certain transactions were miscategorized—is this transaction for “Repairs & Maintenance” or “Construction”? Months later, I cannot remember. Where did those missing 52 cents go? I cannot imagine. Reconciling these discrepancies means clicking checkmarks beside several thousand transactions when the books don’t balance, crosschecking the software records with account statements.
That’s when I thought I hit flow: for hours and hours each day, everything dropped away. There is comfort in organization, in making order out of disorder. My eyes darted back and forth between screens: software, statement, confirmed, click. Software, statement, confirmed, click. I muttered aloud the numbers as I searched for them, like chanting mantra. Tucked away in the attic, the world at Hillholm below me flowed onward, separately: twenty guestrooms filled, guests coming and going, dining and napping, bending in yoga classes, and steaming in the sauna. Meanwhile, I felt my mind kick into hyperdrive: I noticed discrepancies faster, I made connections across disparate parts of the data, and felt the rush of reward with every successful match. But when Winnie whimpered to go outside or Bear popped in with a meal for me, I stopped working in a daze: I felt irritable to be interrupted. Being alone in flow felt great.
The New York Times recently featured a nuanced idea about why we rush: that anxiety is a kind of rushing. Anxiety is rushing through the present moment to address a future problem—Will this relationship fulfill me? Will my boss like my work? Are my investments protecting my retirement? Will I be late for dinner tonight? How will climate change affect my children? We stay up late at night, worrying, because worrying feels like we’re doing something. By worrying, we avoid the hard part—sitting with the dissonant unknown in the present moment—and rush forward to eradicate the source by worrying (or, so we think).
Here’s the catch about that weekend’s flow state: I flowed because of anxiety, not alignment. My repetitive action—software, statement, confirmed, click—felt sedative somehow. My irritability arose from disruptions to that sedation. Categorizing thousands of transactions felt like I was doing something about the fear—Will the project succeed? Will we ever repay this terrifying debt? Will this work destroy my relationship with Bear because we work too much? Will folks approve of our work? (Spoiler: Google reviews say yes, we will succeed, but that doesn’t mean I don’t worry anyway. Thanks, anxiety!) When we pour our hearts and minds into anything, we intuitively know the value of our investment: worrying feels like we’re protecting it somehow. So we rush through the present moments of terror to the future, trying to solve for the unsolvable.
Workaholism often manifests as faux flow for me. When I was a corporate lawyer, we called that flowing feeling “deal high”—as we were closing a big transaction, we felt all the myriad moving parts coalescing into a stream of finished tasks flowing together, until the money finally moved, until someone sent the perfunctory “Congratulations!” email to both sides of the transaction, until we no longer needed to fear that something could go wrong, that we would be responsible, or worse, that we would suddenly realize how soulless life had become. And after the deal high ended, how did we feel? A mixture of relief and, yes, terror: the faux flow was finished, and we needed to face the unknown future again.
Have you experienced faux flow?
Mind your flow,
JennyBess
