I’m taking a break from writing an essay this week. I spent my Monday evening gathering my thoughts and organizing my notes a little more fully, continuing what I began last week.
My goal for this year has been to use this project as a way to invite creativity into my life. On that score, I have certainly succeeded. My other goal was to type up all of my notes, one week at a time. So far, I have managed to write at least something two out of every three weeks. I’m happy with this. But, I will certainly not manage to get through all of the material this year. I’m not too concerned about it, though, because my third goal was to teach myself the material I had been reading, and with this objective I have had the greatest success and fulfillment.
The material that I am thinking through at the moment is more synthetic and integrative than a lot of what I’ve been doing most weeks here. I am collecting my remaining annotations together thematically and drawing out the connections between my main inspirations more fully. This also means going beyond my annotations in most cases and shoring up my understanding with reference back to the original texts. While the artificial deadline of the end of the year was good for motivating me—especially recently—what I have come to realize is that I am far from finished with this project, and that is okay!
I’ve also been giving some thought to whether and how I would want to play the Feelings Collector again next year. There is definitely a feeling that I’ve identified that I would like more of (variety!), but I am also committed to continuing to explore my relationship to Flow and Creativity. Given everything else going on in my life, and my priorities as they are currently arranged, I don’t know that I will have room for all three! Perhaps I will continue to play the Feelings Collector, but just be a little less ambitious this time around. Either way, I still have much to to learn and teach about Creativity and Flow.
As a preview, the major topical groupings are:
Rest in peace, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (or why “Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience” is the best self-help book ever written)
Flow, Creativity, Stillness and Spirituality (or what do Flow, wu wei, samadhi, and psychedelic neuroscience have to do with each other)
The Politics of Flow (or some thoughts on the relationship between personal and collective transformation)
What I learned about “the good life” this year from writing about Flow and Creativity