Control / FLOW

In which a blood sugar battle is joined, but that’s a tale for another time.

Chipping away at the towering gates of the to-read stack: two 90 minute-sessions divided into two 45 minute chunks, themselves divided into a 15 minute chunk – for non-fiction (and between non-fic books, my continued journey through Montaigne's essays) – and a 30-minute chunk – for fiction.

In the 15, currently: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's FLOW: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPTIMAL EXPERIENCE. 70 pages in, give or take. Fascinating; a standout, a glimmer of recognition:

"Thus the flow experience is typically described as involving a sense of control––or, more precisely, as lacking the sense of worry about losing control that is typical in many situations of normal life." – Csikszentmihalyi, p. 59.

It's in my (conscious or unconscious, both, maybe) efforts to apply that sense of control unearthed in the flowstate – or, rather my efforts at getting and keeping myself in that state of autotelic ("A self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward") / exotelic ("activities done for external reasons only...") balance during my two working hours in the morning and the two in the evening – to those non-working hours that frustration, resentment, and self-directed disappointment reign supreme.

I've often called the writing of This Fucking Book (working title) a Sisyphean undertaking; pretty certain now that it's not during the writing part of my day but during the non-working hours that I get my Sisyphus on.

Recommended (the book, not the futility of attempting to control the uncontrollable - or the blood sugar battle).