"Thought is the enemy of flow" - Vinnie Colaiuta

A famous drummer I'd never heard of until I saw someone post this quote - but apparently he is King Drummer, toast of the technical mags.

I wondered if it's true

In life

In writing

Or any kind of creative practice

I sort of think it's bunk, but then I'm very wedded to thought and thinking. Takes a lot to turn it off.

But I wondered if it might not even be true in music

(I'm not a musician so can't really speak to that)

But yeah thought - thought is flow, isn't it? Even linear thought is flow - just channeled a bit.

(This whole thing of being anti-linearity is very dated and '90s I think.)

(Yet also makes me think of that Edward de Bono fellow and his "lateral thinking" paperbacks that you'd see in the 1970s. Stuff that was made to be the stuff of management retraining seminars - "get your executives thinking outside the box and increase your profits" )

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maybe sports is where this maxim of the world-famous drummer does apply

is this what sports people mean when they talk about being "in the zone" - where it's all automatic and reflexive...

perhaps sports is like a reversion to the state of grace of the animal - the instinctive movements of the predator and the prey

animals follow the rules of their nature, responds to the threats or opportunities provided by other creatures who are following the rules of their nature

no deliberation, no self-doubt, no decisions to be made as such

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i am a supremely mediocre tennis player, but playing tennis I have felt something like this flow, and it is a kind of animal-like ecstasy of action, you make a shot that outwits your opponent and you feel like a wily fox... you leap like a leopard to make a difficult return...

football or a team sports, perhaps that is more like herd-consciousness or pack-consciousness - depending on whether in the defensive or attacking mode maybe - the antelope or the wolf

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is "flow" just a near-synonym for "be here now? so not thought is the enemy so much as either future-oriented thinking (planning, anxiety, anticipation) OR past-oriented thinking (memory, regret, retracing footsteps etc) - anything that detracts/distracts from the moment-to-moment thinking

i have played videogames maybe a dozen times in my life but i should imagine the flow-state is a major part of the attraction

i wonder where gambling fits in this - it's not quite in the moment but there's a tremendous tension directed towards a moment to come (the horse crosses the line, the hand of cards is revealed) but it's so imminent and so tensed that all else is blotted out - all other worries in your life contract to this single Worry. I wouldn't know, i'm not a gambler, but I did just recently watch California Split, the great Altman film about addicted gamblers

those automatons you see at the fruit machines in Vegas are in a kind of flow (which begs the question of whether there are state-of-grace flows and profane, profoundly-fallen flows)

(in Vegas there is actually a college of Gambling Studies, a grim looking building on the outskirts of town)

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the combination of focus, challenge, flow and resistance to flow is probably why puzzle books are so popular, especially with middle aged and elderly folk - their equivalent of games actually

solitaire also

playing chess must be where thought and flow are the same thing - wouldn't know, supremely mediocre chess player -

chinese checkers though (more my level) is thoughtflowtastic - it's problem solving but short term - and nothing real at stake

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"play" is the word - playing music, playing games, playing the fool

child-games especially (chase, hide and seek, etc) are pure flow 

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dancing

dancing on E

frolic

or in German fröhlich, meaning something like gay or merry

is this the "gay science" of which Friedrich speaks? 

ah well that is the German original of the book - Die fröhliche Wissenschaft

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"The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz." - Mihály Csíkszentmihályi on the "flow state", aka “complete immersion in an activity"