Ah. To wake up without an alarm clock and look forward to the work that I'm about to do. To sit atop a Sunday evening and see a week of opportunity and enjoyment. To feel content with the subject of my life.

These are things I don't have, but yearn to have.

I've picked up this book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chicks-sent-me-high") titled Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. By understanding flow, perhaps I can understand the ingredients of a rich work-narrative. One suggested ingredient is the structure of a game: rules, feedback, goals, rewards, and control.

Another suggested ingredient is personal growth. I found this chart helpful:

(Csikszentmihalyi 74)

Anxiety is evidence of an over-challenging task. Boredom is evidence of something that's too easy. If you glide the sweet spot of balance between challenges and skills, then you are more likely to flow.

I interpret this to mean that work-flow comes when you frequently feel personal improvement. In addition, my personal addendum is that you should care where the improvement goes. For example, sure I can improve my skills at playing chess, but at the end of the day who cares?

Three sources have led me to stumble upon this book:
1. I was in the dorms, bored, and asked a random student for a book, perhaps one on psychology—he handed me Flow.
2. Blog buddy Bob Ryskamp has referred to the book a couple of times. Check out his An Autotelic New Year and my own comments.
3. Marty Seligman in Authentic Happiness glows about Mihaly and his work.

Sauntering back to the Cowper House, I have three items in my hands. A triangle of life in my clasps, grasped.

1

Fül
Fuel. Energy. A healthy sandwich. Necessary foundation for everything.

2

Tome Wisdome
Wisdom book. An inspiring read of a life overflowing with passion. Basic premise: "You have to lose your mind in order to use your head." If I have the pace to pick a book randomly and casually stroll through it, then everything is okay.

3

Juz de Aesthetico
Aesthetic Juice.
The primate in all of us is drawn to the explosion of hues that fruits and flowers display. Unfortunately, man-made, tangy dyes have made ads, clothing, and everything artificially fruitful(less). If I have the wherewithal to pick up flowers, then I know everything is okay.

this is life. This is happiness. The creative play. The ludic life.

I read in adBusters a letter sort of like this:

Think about when you are out dancing by the lake. Think about when your friends are lying on the couch laughing. Think about when you pick up poetry for fun. When it is over, isn't it annoying how everyone sighs, "well, back to the real world."

Why is the world of work, that socially-constructed, capitalistic, industrial complex considered the "real world??"

"No!" I say. The 'real world' is when you are engaging in play. The unreal world is the one where you are selling your time away for wage. Sighing, "well, back to the real world," is to confuse negative space with positive space. It is in the freedom of ludic moments that true friendships and true vivacity is found.

The ludic life.

Definition of "ludic:" Of or relating to play or playfulness.

Some inspiration derived from The Abolition of Work.

yes.

Good evening sirs and madams, here is your fortune cookie for today:

It was a failure of imagination on my part. So many calamities, big and small, are: the failure or inability to work out the day-to-day consequences, over a period, of our actions.

...

She was like those people who retire to a place where they have holidayed, and in this holiday place become frantic with boredom and solitude.

This is from V. S. Naipaul's Suckers, a short-story fiction in the June 7th New Yorker

This bit reminds me of my impetuous trip to London. What happened was that I had just finished watching The Hours and by the incessant suggestions of Virgina Woolf, "I must go to London," combined with my self-intoxication of the "pursue your passions from the get-go" meme, and a quick $200 round-trip flight to London, I decided to embark in 2 weeks. Boom. It was suicide. I was there by myself and did nothing for a month. It was on the one hand, everything I wanted: meditating at 4am in front of statues, staring at paintings at museums (free entry), falling asleep on buses and ambling my way back to Picadilly. On the other hand, I was lonely and bored to death. However, that was when I first started Philosophistry, so there's always a silver lining.

Second fortune cookie.

This time a real fortune cookie combined with some advice from a new client of mine: "Keep your eyes on the prize but your feet on the ground." This is important for people who want the HOLY GRAIL (for artists). What is the HOLY GRAIL?

THE HOLY GRAIL IS...

Pursue your passions from the get-go but get paid handsomely at the same time.

My client suggested, and this is confirmed by the fortune cookie and some other stuff I read elsewhere, that it is important to stay at one location and build up an artist's karma. Eventually editors and gallery-owners get intimate with your name as you plant seeds that take 10 years to grow. Eventually you pass a certain threshold and people start respecting your work.

I love Palo Alto so far, and I'm gaining a great rhythm here. I've already built some karma with my hard work invested into Stanford and various relationships that I've maintained.

We shall seeeee.

PS. this is a wild panoramic shot of my room.

I'm re-taking a course this quarter, Math 53 - Differential Equations. I had taken this course this past summer, but at the last minute decided that I didn't want to take the final. Why did I do this?

I came to the conclusion that week that the pursuit of my passions was principally important (and it still is). Part of pursuing those passions involves maximizing the amount of activities that you do that are passionate from the get go. That at every instant, I should be pursuing my passions. I said to myself, well, if I REALLY wanted to prove to myself that this was an important goal, then I wouldn't even take this final coming up. And so I didn't. I proved something, but in retrospect I don't think my reasoning was correct.

Reasoning that "rejecting the dispassionate committed me to the pursuit of passion" was a little irrational. I committed the fallacy of denying the antecodent. I took "Doing things I'm passionate about means I care about my passions" to mean also "Doing things I'm not passionate about means I don't care about my passions" Bad Phil Bad Phil.

From an aphorism-like perspective, I could've smelt an excuse and thought about the problem more deeply, or applied some "common sense" algorithm. Further proof that you sould unify both your rational thinking and your emotions.

On the other hand, rejecting things you are dispassionate about gives you more time for things that you are passionate about, so indirectly it helps your passions, but only indirectly.

I think the way to tell if something you're writing has passion is to see if it has voice. or not just voice, but if it has .... well... I guess... okay, now I'm just rambling on here.

Any true soul firehose should be like 9 parts emotional lava and 1 part cerebral. I think the primary insight I'm rolling over is the idea that I have spent too much of my artistic chalk in my brain. I've been calculating, strategizing, planning, and "managing" this blog and my free-timed parts of my life toward specific goals. But that subordinates anything mysterious, anything worth laying out in the sun for others to appreciate.

well, we'll see. a week can't hurt. I got karma to burn as they say on slashdot and plastic.com

The idea of having a public passion is somehow bearing on me, it's interesting.

I don't know, well my blog is serving a totally different use you know, I'm not purely interested in hits.

but what I'm interested in is truly making something useful.

Unfortunately, my blog has then ceased to become about being a personal reflection of what it means to be Phil... primarily well, I think that's not what people want.

yeah, there's' something tricky about this perspective.

like, I could go back to the old style, you know, of really throwing myself out there, then it'll be a great release for me.

Continue reading...

Part of the reason why I paint is because it sharpens my skills in many other areas. What I learned today:
- It's not about decisions it's about feeling
- It's not about direction it's about process
- It's not about plans, it's about influence
- and It's not about projects, it's about loves

Yeah yeah, foofey stuff, but it helps my art and therefore shouldn't hurt in my business.