“Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”
Isak Dinesen
Sometimes the difference between a mediocre day and an amazing one is as simple as doing an activity that makes you lose the sense of time. Carl Jung put it best when he wrote “What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Herein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.” This is known as flow state and a variety of activities lead to it. It could be playing sports, hiking, gardening, cooking, or painting. In my case, I’ve always had an affinity with writing. When you’re writing, losing yourself in an article to the point that you forget everything else is scary. It’s also amazing.
The thing about writing, like many other creative pursuits, is that it’s difficult. Since we tend to avoid difficult things, we might never get to the point where we achieve a flow state. Steven Pressfield wrote this in The War of Art: “There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s now the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.” The solution is to turn that activity into a habit. When you do, it becomes less hard the more you do it. “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp” W. Somerset Maugham wrote.
But what is it about writing that makes me forget about everything else? “Paper has more patience than people”, Anne Frank wrote in her journal. When I’m journaling, for instance, I’m focusing on events that might seem trivial to others. Yet that’s often how I solve those issues, by bringing them up regardless of how unimportant they might seem and that’s the first step toward a solution.
I spent the entirety of this article discussing writing, but know that you can achieve a flow state by doing several activities. Your job is to figure out what that is and once you know it, you turn it into a routine. Do the task in question often and lose yourself in it. Few things in life are as satisfying as that.