I was thinking this week about what my goal is in writing these blog posts every week. There are at least three that come to mind, but perhaps more.
Read moreCsikszentmihalyi on Creativity, part 1 of n
I’m putting up an abbreviated post this week, as I will be helping facilitate a Jubilee School for the Debt Collective on Thursday evening when I normally would be writing. Fortunately, I have a lot of drafted and semi-drafted material banked up from playing the Feelings Collector last year to work with when there is less time.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—author of “Flow” and one of my early guides in this adventure—wrote a book about creativity, which I also read last year. “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention” had a powerful effect in drawing me toward creativity as my chosen feeling for 2021, but I didn’t annotate it as extensively as “Flow” for a couple of reasons that seem somewhat unimportant now. At any rate, I will likely come back to this text, because there are some very useful chapters based on an extraordinarily rich set of interview data. Many of the conclusions in the book—and indeed the quotes below—are based on the collective insights provided into the creative process by the hundreds of individuals who were interviewed for this study.
Read moreIntellectual Work as Spiritual Work: or, Liturgies for Living
Last week, I wrote about finding flow at work in 2020. Really, I spent a lot of last year thinking about work and my career trajectory. A lot happened—between finishing my dissertation, “going on the market” without an affiliation, and beginning to explore a career outside of academia—and it all gave me plenty to reflect on.
One of the reasons I had sought more flow in work was because I felt like was somehow necessary to developing expertise, something I felt lacking in my life. On the one hand, I recognized the importance of being an expert on something that matters to career advancement in academia; on the other, I was frustrated with my first attempt to really become an expert in something. It didn’t really go how I was expecting it to and has not led me to the kind of place that I wanted to be. So, naturally, I sought solace and guidance to address this conundrum where I often do: in essays and books.
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