The Inner Game of Life

Oh my word, my desk. My desk is in such a mess. This is what working on a book looks like in my part of the world. Meaning in my study. 

It took me way, way too long to find my notes on The Inner Game of Tennis. I had to return the book to the library, because I had renewed it twice and someone else had put a hold on it. Which goes to show you that it’s an excellent book, first published in 1972 by W. Timothy Gallwey, at that time a tennis coach. In future, a life coach. His book became a best seller, not only because tennis was super sexy back then, what with Bjorn Borg and Chris Evert and those incredible icons, but because the book spoke to non tennis players as well. Everyone likes a good sports analogy, so learning to play tennis well became an analogy for success in other (business) realms. 

And, in fact it transpires that I have not found those notes. If only I could find those notes. I found the dog treats I use to lure Milo to sit with me upstairs when he would rather patrol downstairs. I found the little sticky note tabs I like to mark pages with when I’m looking for juicy quotes. I found the chunks of Himalayan pink salt I bought from a Himalayan pink salt-and-other-holistic-and-New Age-gewgaw-selling shop in Troy. The 9th grader and I were showing our French exchange student around and I felt too guilty tromping in and out without buying something. Salt, like talk, is relatively cheap. Also, if it actually does absorb the bad energy from my laptop and purify the air, as claimed, then—yay! We were looking for hipsters that day in Troy, by the way, since apparently they’re not in our exchange student’s town in France. No hipsters in the Himalayan pink salt-and-holistic-gewgaws shop. Perhaps that was to be expected. We did find a couple working in the barber shop. Then it began to rain, and we headed for the car. 

But I digress. I wanted to talk about The Inner Game of Tennis, since Wimbledon is happening now. I did find a short note about the Inner Game, but not the longer notes. The short note was almost overridden by my jottings on color and value, which I took, while avoiding work on my book, from a blog about fashion and choosing the best colors for my skin tone. Did you know there is much more to choosing colors than undertones? There is also the amount of contrast. Color contrast and value contrast. 

I don’t remember what any of that means, at this point. 

But here are a couple of key ideas from The Inner Game. The whole book is about unlocking your potential, and if that seems like a cliché, just remember that Gallwey was one of the originators of this self-help idea. There’s so much in the book that has been taken and developed and studied and better understood over the last several decades since it was published that I see why it’s considered a bedrock text. 

Unlocking potential takes some skill, but the essence of it is cultivating relaxed concentration. To do that, says Gallwey, you have to learn how to stop Self 1, which is the conscious, superego-like self, from getting in the way of Self 2, your unconscious self, controlled by the nervous system. The interplay between these two selves determines how well you can translate your knowledge into action. 

Now, Gallwey is talking about tennis. Specifically, he believes that after you’ve learned the basic strokes, your Self 1 is a big saboteur. Doubt and self-criticism live in Self 1. Self 2 is the keeper of muscle memory and innate confidence. So, to perform at your best—in the zone—occupy Self 1 with something concrete on which to focus, such as keeping your eye on the ball. Focused on the ball, Self 1 forgets to be all judgmental and doubtful. In fact, Self 1 practices non-judgmental seeing. This frees up Self 2 and thus, with a combination of mindfulness and concentration and release, you have relaxed concentration. 

There’s one more key skill Gallwey teaches, and that is picturing the outcome you want. For example, want to stop serving into the net? Literally and metaphorically? Picture your serve going over and landing right in the box. Then focus on the ball. Voilà. 

See what I mean about all the elements that are current? You have the two selves (Kahneman). You have your mindfulness (Jon Kabat-Zinn and everyone). You have your positive thinking (you name it, she says it). You have flow (Czikszentmihalyi). You have maximizing potential. You have success. 

Yup. 

The Joys of the Small Life

Cups of tea symbolize the joys of the small life

Is it enough to live a small life? That is the question, Readers. After all, small lives are often the subjects of books. Of big books, even. Shouldn’t that answer the question in the affirmative? After all, if you’ve made it into a book, well, that is something. 

And yet, some of us (remaining nameless) pine for something more. Something More. Achievement. Recognition. Dare I say it - success? 

Perhaps my question is silly. Of course it's okay to live a small life. After all, most people do. And they don't feel small. Perhaps the question I'm more interested in is why are some people happy with lower-case-a-achievement while others jones for upper-case-A-Achievement? 

Look, here I am undermining my whole blog. Haven’t I been trying to find a way to merge success with regular life? Why, yes, I have. That has been my mind experiment. And I have done pretty well. I have figured out my system, my method, my scaffolding on which to build a feeling of success. But sometimes some of us (remaining nameless) want more than a feeling of success. We want actual goals met. You know - achievements.

Well, in fact, I think I’ve shown that we all want to achieve goals. That is the essence of living a life of meaning and purpose. But I struggle with the goals. I question why some people are fine with small goals, while others want BIG goals. 

This brings us to the fish-pond question. You know the one. Would you rather be a small fish in a big pond, or a big fish in a small pond? That's pretty clear. It's about how ambitious you are. What no one asks is do you want to be a small fish in a small pond? Because not everyone can be a big fish. Not that being a big fish is a zero-sum proposition. There can be more than one big fish. But not everyone can be a big fish, since big fishness is a matter of proportion, and proportion is relative. What happens to all the small fish? Are they all okay being small fish? 

Am I content being a small fish?

What if you're a small fish who wants to be big? It's taking every ounce of my self-control not to go for the obvious pun here. Aw, heck, I have insufficient self-control. What if you're a small fish who wants to be big? Well, then you're scrod. 

Get it? Scrod - screwed? 

Thank you. I'll be here all week. 

Anyway. I've talked to many people about success, and one thing I've noticed is that people feel successful because they have fulfilled their ambitions. And their ambitions are entirely reasonable. For example, being nominated for teacher of the year in their state - but not winning. Or filling the slots in their therapy practice.

Then there are other people. The people who want More. I was walking with a friend - let's call her Julia - the other day, and she was telling me about her friend who feels dissatisfied with her life. This friend of Julia's says she feels like she is meant to do More, to Achieve something. And she asked Julia, "Don't you feel like that?" And Julia said, "No. I feel pretty good with where I am."

Although of course on this walk, Julia then wondered to me if she ought to be feeling like she wanted More. And I thought, Goodness, no! If you are happy with where you are in life, you are good. 

I suppose this question of satisfaction with fish size and pond size boils down to my mathematical definition of success. That's right, there’s a formula for it.  The formula is X=Y, when X=achievement and Y=ambition. Or vice-versa. Here is a graph that shows what happens when success equals achievement. 

Ridiculously hard to make this graph online, so....

This is ideal. This is the perfect balance, right? No matter your level of ambition, your achievement equals it. Yup. Simple. 

Of course, life is not actually simple. All kinds of things can cause the graph to fluctuate. Well, actually, not all kinds of things. On an x/y graph, only the x & y data can fluctuate. But they do. Oh, they do. So what if the level of ambition is much higher than the level of achievement?

Well, then you have people like me, I suppose. We aim high, but might achieve little. So is that okay? What if we turn into bitter old ladies? Biddies, one might say, if biddie=bitter plus lady.  Does it? Let's say it does. Is that where bitter old ladies come from? Disappointed ambition? This is when Pema Chodron comes in handy. 

This brings me to another point, a much less tragic one. In one way, ambition must constantly recalibrate itself, because once you achieve a goal, it's human nature to formulate a new one. Furthermore, creativity in all areas of life requires this readjustment. Once a goal is conceived, strived for, and reached, creativity demands a new one. This idea is fundamental to the ideas of mastery and flow, which I’ve mentioned before, flow being fundamental to happiness and success; mastery being fundamental to flow; the dynamic relationship between the challenging but not too challenging mini-goal and the drive to meet it being fundamental to mastery. And all of it essential to living a life of meaning and purpose. So, in short, achievement and ambition are necessary, although levels must vary.

Which brings me to Barbara Pym. I suppose it’s no coincidence that while I await the publishing verdict on my book proposal, a verdict which could potentially mark a large achievement with a capital-A, I have returned to Pym’s books. Pym takes the reader into the smallest of small worlds, the small parish near or in Oxford, England in the 1950s-1970s, the world of spinsters, of cups of tea, of crushes on curates and gentlewomen’s companions. It’s a keenly observed world where very little happens, and things that do are pretty darn small and centered in the parish. And yet, everything is there that makes life meaningful: goals, ideas, purpose, some religion, community (too much), independence of thought, depth of feeling, and human connection. In short, these small subjects, as I mentioned above, make worthy subjects for books. So I will extrapolate that, yes, small lives are inherently worthy. And I will try to make peace with mine. 

Gone Fishin' - Why Success Matters

Here's a brief dispatch from the beach, where I try to avoid serious thinking in favor of allowing the waves to mesmerize me.

Just to emphasize the paradox of the random symmetry of life I must mention that the garage door broke just before we left, almost exactly three years after we arrived at the beach and received an email from our neighbor asking if we meant to leave the garage door open. We had not. It was broken then, and it is broken now. This time we left it closed and un-openable.

But that's nothing to do with success. Being at the beach can make a person wonder if success even matters. Being at the beach in a beach rental property that is also for sale for just over two million dollars can make a person wonder if there's any point in defining success in any other way than as having lots of money and power.

So I'm just going to leave you with this little bit of wisdom: success matters, and success is not about the ability to buy a beach house.

Here's the thing. I think the drive for success is built into us. It's intertwined with the desire for meaning. Sure, people put a lot of emphasis on happiness, and happiness is definitely desirable. Howevs, the positive psychologists who study this stuff have figured out that happiness is a byproduct of being in the state of flow. And the state of flow, as I've discussed in other posts, is a condition of being totally absorbed in an activity. Now this activity is not just any activity. To achieve flow, you have to be involved in something that is challenging, but not so difficult that it's frustrating, and you have to actually achieve mastery of that challenge - and then go on to create another satisfying challenge. It's a process kind of like riding waves, if you will.

And this is why I conclude that success is important. In flow, you are continually striving for a goal, then resetting your goal and striving for the new one. It's made up of series of challenges and successes, and this process is essential to happiness. Therefore, ergo, success is important to happiness, and if we all agree that happiness matters, it follows that success matters, too.

Image by Phoebe Amory 2015

Revisiting Values and the Scaffolding of Success

Values. One of the supports of the scaffolding of success is knowing your values and living in accord with them. I could take you through the reasons why, but just trust me. Whenever you talk to or read experts about success, happiness, and the meaning of life, they always bring the subject around to knowing your values. After all, everyone wants to live a meaningful life. Doing work that has meaning, feeling like you have a purpose, being able to get into flow depends on zeroing in on what is important to you.

At the end of October, we went to visit our friends in Boston. You know the weekend, the one when we left the Senior home alone with strict instructions not to let anyone drunk in our house. (Except us, of course.) But no drunk teens, due to liability issues. I was feeling okay about leaving her alone, if okay means heart palpitations and inability to sleep coupled with the constant feeling of needing to pee. In my secret heart, I felt we owed it to her to leave her alone at least once before she goes to college.

I was fine, even after, while walking Milo, encountering my neighbor, who recounted the times her children attended parties that destroyed homes while unsuspecting parents were out of town. Even after she told me that one night she actually got “that call you never want to get, the police calling to say your child is en route to the hospital with alcohol poisoning.” 

Yeah, anyway, blithely off to Boston we went, to visit our Yankee friends. These guys are Yankees through and through. Meaning that they keep the thermostat at 56 F and return well-worn items to L.L. Bean for replacement because of their lifetime guarantee. In honor of our visit, they said they were willing to break their rule of never bumping up the heat voluntarily until after Nov. 1 and they would do so for us, if it got really cold. I felt like a wuss knowing they looked upon us that way, as needing more heat. Which I do. It is true. I keep the heat at 66 during the day and bump it up to 68 regularly. 

So anyway, off we went. I tucked the book I had to read for an assignment into my bag, even though the husband mocked me for thinking we would have time to read. It was an interesting book, up my bowling alley as they say, a self-help book. I can’t say the title, since I reviewed it, for actual money, and it has not yet come out. It was all about how tapping into your true values makes you happier and more successful and helps improve the world. Just the kind of self-help stuff my Yankee friends would never read, let alone think. 

I tried out this idea as we huddled around their kitchen table, cupping our hands over our glasses of whiskey for warmth. I told them I was reading a pre-publication copy of a book about figuring out your values and learning to live in accord with them. This book talked about how it can be difficult to determine what you actually value, as opposed to what you feel you should value. Check. I have had that problem. 

My Yankee friend looked at me like I’d, I don’t know, turned the heat up to 70. Wouldn’t you just automatically do the stuff that was important to you? She wanted to know. 

Nothing like a Yankee to reduce a self-help book to cinders. It was as if, when I began to describe this book to them, immediately the idea in it seemed to disintegrate.

Basically, my Yankee friends couldn’t conceive how anyone would need to discover his or her values. They would just know them. Furthermore, they would just live in accord with them. Or, if they weren’t totally in accord with them, due to the need to pay bills - a common situation among most people - then they would accept that and move on. What’s the namby-pamby big deal about finding your values? That was the gist of the conversation.

Readers, I felt about the size of a lemon seed after this. I symbolically had to semi-raise my hand sheepishly and say that I, personally, had found it very hard to settle on my actual true values. Which is probably because I’m not a gritty, hardy Yankee. 

And yet, they are right, to a degree. We all make our choices and spend our time, and therefore we must value what we do. Indeed,I have come to see that despite my internal conflicts over should and should not, I have managed to live, after all, doing the things I want to do. At least as far as they are in my control. 

But for example, say you have a kid who is into soccer and you are not into soccer. Well, then you have to go to all these soccer games and stand around and try to keep your eye on the ball and recognize one ponytailed preteen from another - can you tell I speak here from experience? - well, then in that situation, you are doing something you don’t value. You might even consider it a waste of time. However, if I brought my Yankee friend’s clarity of thought to the situation, perhaps I could look at it a different way. Maybe I am doing exactly what I value, because what I value most is supporting my child. Therefore, wasting my time and being bored out of my mind and utterly unable to tell one ponytail from another across the field is actually living in accord with my values. So I need to get over myself. 

Now, say you have two children, or three, or more. For each child, presumably, you find yourself weaving various strands of obligation into a nice potholder of life. You’re going to games, performances, and meetings relating to your children, but you feel you have forgotten what you value, or you’re not sure anymore. Because what you value gets buried under the day-to-day stuff you do. 

potholders of life
c/o Creative Commons Google Images

So, with a tip of the hat to my Yankee friend, I have to say that in this situation, you can actually get confused about what you value. Do you value supporting your child in her endeavors? Or was it rooting for the team to win that game and engaging in fisticuffs with other over-invested parents? 

I guess a lot of my life is like that. What I want or prioritize day-to-day and hour-to-hour can be in conflict; but what I do incrementally, over time, speaks to my underlying priorities - and those are my true values. 

Or do I have it backwards? Do I do exactly what I value every day, being a SAHM and a writer (which means at times a procrastinator, a do-nothinger, a daydreamer, and a slob) but still feel like I should (SHOULD) be doing something else: having a more well-defined profession with a salary and benefits and hours and special work clothes. 

So I guess what I’m saying is that I admire my Yankee friend’s certainty; but I am equally certain that it’s all too easy to lose track of what you value and wonder what it is. 

#TBT Getting In the Flow

Hi, Readers, 

I know you’re all dying to know about my foot. Well, It’s kind of embarrassing. I’m pretty much a cliche - a limping cliche - of the aging non-athlete trying to stay in shape, lose a little midsection fat, and thus thereby injuring herself. A couple of weeks ago, I put on a pair of ancient running shoes and took a very lame run/walk along the dirt path near my house. When I came back, my foot hurt a little. I basically ignored it - but I did buy new shoes - and it remained the same, just a little hurt area on the outside middle bottom of my foot, if you want the deets (that’s the details, FYI) Then, at the beach, after a couple of days of running, beach walking, wave jumping, and dune climbing, it really hurt, throbbed, ached and was generally un-ignorable. I had gone from a lame little run/walk to being actually lame.

Now, if I were the protagonist of a murder mystery, say, then I’d have this painful foot that I’d refuse bullheadedly to admit was really painful. I’d keep using it and making it worse, limping and throbbing my way through my adventures until the end, when I could finally relax and get it looked at, after the murderer was caught, thanks to me and my stoic, chaotic self. However, I’m not such a protagonist. Instead, I hunkered down on the pool deck of our vacation rental and iced my foot and read a murder mystery containing one. That was The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith, a.k.a. J.K. Rowling. 

I have since consulted a doctor, who advised me that my foot was not broken, that I had a strained tendon, and that I should refrain from running or other pounding exercise for another two weeks. Thus, my attempt to ramp up my exercise has turned into a disaster. However, the foot is mostly all better. 

All this leads me to this. This is one of those weeks when I'm not feeling so successful. It seems like a good day to take a look back at one of the earlier lessons I learned about success. I need the reminder. Maybe you do, too. 

Getting In the Flow 8/18/2011

There's a difference between appearing successful and feeling successful, and it's the feeling part I'm
after. Of course the appearing part matters -- I do have various material goals. The main characteristic I'm seeking, however, is a feeling. Maybe it could also be called self-worth, or self-esteem, or self-confidence. I call it success.

Appearing successful, after all, is relative. Indeed, one of my friends described my life as "the classic success story," i.e., a lovely house in the suburbs; good marriage; good kids. What more could anyone need to feel successful? That's what I'm trying to find out. I could point out that what I paid for my house in upstate NY, wouldn't buy even a studio apartment in Manhattan. I might consider my friend H, who has a lawyer husband, doesn't need to work outside the home, and has a gorgeous apartment that is the entire eleventh floor of a prewar building on the Upper West Side, plus a home in the Hamptons, to be successful.

We all know plenty of stories, though, of people who have all the trappings of material, worldly success on the outside, but who are secretly tens of thousands of dollars in debt, secretly paralyzed by terrible marriages, secretly suffering with difficult children, etc, etc.

A corollary is the person, like my friend R, who has excelled on the worldly success level, but announces that she never feels totally satisfied with herself. She stands on her tiptoes, raises her hand way above her head, and says, "I always expect this of myself," then lowers her hand to chin level, "and I always feel I end up like this."  Or the Pulitzer Prize winning writer I know, who can't help feeling bothered when a book of his doesn't get reviewed in the New York Times.

So it's the feeling of success I'm searching for. My sister, a psychoanalyst, describes feeling successful as being in a state of flow. I've come across the term, defined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (No, I can't pronounce it -- but my sister can.) In brief, flow is a state of immersed, energetic focus on a task. The work must be intrinsically rewarding, and balance between being challenging, but not too challenging.  In flow, a person is emotionally and intellectually engaged, working hard, but not aware of time passing. In short, we like to exert effort, but rewarded effort, and when the exertion produces results, we feel successful.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: Or, Why Faucets Are the Key to Success

Right now I’m a little perplexed. See, I read this book, Shop Craft as Soulcraft, at the recommendation of friends who know I’m on this success thing. Well, he’s an unusual thinker, this guy, the author. He studied philosophy at the University of Chicago, but dropped out of his Ph.D program and went back to what he’d done to support himself through college – being a mechanic. Specializing in motorcycles.

Matthew Crawley, a.k.a. Dan Stevens via Wikimedia Commons

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, is by Matthew B. Crawford, whose name is somewhat like Matthew Crawley, as fans of Downton Abbey will recognize.  Matthew Crawley, would, I think, be right on board with Crawford’s argument, as he likes to see himself as a working fellow and not beholden to the wealth he may (or may not) inherit from Lord and Lady Grantham. But I digress, readers.

Now, I’ve bought Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and not read it. Twice. But this book I read. Why? Because my friends recommended it, natch. 

What is it about motorcycle mechanics? Who knew they were so cerebral?

Cerebral mechanics prove one of the author’s points (stay with me, Readers, especially those who tune in for the story portion of my posts)- that people underestimate the intellectual challenge of manual labor, when it’s skilled manual labor. Another of his points is that we’ve done a disservice to ourselves by creating a dichotomy in schools between technical/vocation and academic training. This argument is part of the author’s largest point, which is that we are all f**cked - pardon the French - because we’ve identified being successful in life with academic credentials and high paying white collar work, at the same time that we’ve turned skilled manual work into unskilled manual work and thereby deprived people of the satisfaction of jobs where they have the opportunity to fix something/do something/put effort into something and see the result. So many people are miserable at their white collar jobs because they are essentially working towards abstract goals like customer satisfaction, without any concrete means to produce this satisfaction. They never feel successful, even if they achieve many credentials and earn many dollars. Meanwhile, schools have phased out shop class and other practical elements of high school education in past decades like home economics, because manual labor is now so devalued that white collar folks are not supposed to want or to need to have anything to do with it.

It’s really kind of rough to read a book pointing out that the entire aim of your education, and of your life, is probably going to lead you to existential despair, and that you’re directing your children to the same pit of misery by sending them to school instead of to the local garage for a few pointers. I mean, who wants to hear that? Not I. Thus, my perplexity.

So I have to point out the giant flaw in this book. Okay, maybe it’s a rather small flaw, actually, but it’s the flaw the broke the camel’s argument, at least for this reader.

Crawford says that automatic faucets in public restrooms are the Devil’s work. That is right. Apparently, we’d be better people if we had to work at the little stuff, like turning on and off the faucets, which gives us more autonomy because we have control over our environment.

Okay, Readers, he didn’t actually say anything about the Devil. Here’s what he says of these automatic items:

Why should there not be a handle?....It's true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving it the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality. (p. 56)

Offends the spirited personality? No, it does not.

Hello. I consider myself a spirited personality. I, for one, love an automatic faucet. Heck, I’m fond of automatic soap dispensers, too. Automatic flush toilets, when they don’t flush at inopportune moments or refuse to flush at crucial ones are high on my list of likes, too. And bathroom doors that push open, so you don’t have to touch a door handle. You know, if you want to install automatic doors on public restrooms, I am not going to feel my autonomy is threatened in any way. Go ahead.

Clearly, this author has never spent much time in public restrooms. More specifically, he hasn’t spent time in public restrooms with small children. Why should there not be a handle? Let me tell you why: germs. 

Now, I may wax more vocal on the subject of germs and small children than others, but I know I am not alone in my mysophobic tendencies. When I have doubted this and have wondered if I need to embark on a series of cognitive behavior therapy sessions, all I have to do is visit a public restroom. I need spend only a moment or two in said facility, before a mother with a small child enters a stall, and I hear, “Don’t touch anything.” The tone and emphases vary. “Do. Not. Touch. Anything.” “Don’t touch ANYthing.” “Do NOT touch anything.” And the volume varies, too. The words, never. They always bring a smile to my face, as well as a warm sunburst of compassion for the person who is busily papering over the entire stall before allowing her small fry to do his or her business. I vividly recall accompanying my cousin while she took her first child, then potty training, to a public restroom. This was long before I had children. She practically mummified the toilet before putting her child on it and saying (loudly and with equal emphasis on each word, the mommy mantra, “Do Not Touch Anything.)

So I am then reminded that I am not in fact crazy. (Or, I suppose, that crazy runs in my family, but at least I am not alone.) And then I get the bleep out of those tiled germ holes, using only my forearms to push open the door, or grasping the door handle with my shirtsleeve pulled over my hand, and trying not to inhale too deeply.

I think I’ve proved my point.

Or maybe Matthew Crawford’s.

Because, really, it's perfect for this post, too, I'm reusing this picture and its caption:
I encourage my children to use sharp tools.

Okay, listen, I may be guilty of reductio ad absurdum here. That’s my right. It’s my blog. Frankly, it's one of my specialties. 

I will admit that dealing with faucets and knobs while evading germs has given me a certain satisfaction derived from my ingenuity and dexterity with paper towels and shirt sleeves, and if I never had to do that again, I’d be robbed of that sort of direct feedback on my autonomous efforts to avoid gross stuff in bathrooms. Beyond that, I see the satisfaction the 5^th grader gets from using the can opener and the sharp knives to make tuna salad for us. I do see Crawford’s point. Even as I cringe upstairs in my bedroom while she chops a carrot, the sharp knock of the blade on the cutting board ringing through the house. Autonomy, the ability to use one’s intellect, and the chance to physically produce a result, when combined lead to a feeling of deep success and satisfaction.  But you’re never going to win me over with that automatic faucet argument. 

Don't F**k With a Bus and Other Rules for Successful Living

In high school one of my best friends, Maude, taught me two rules for driving that I've never forgotten. The first is self-explanatory, or it should be. It's the second that interests me today.

1. Don't f**k with a bus.

2. Look where you want to go, and you will automatically steer the car there.

Maude, as a few of my tens of readers know, was (is) delicate, small-boned, had the neatest cursive for a lefty and possibly ever, and a mouth like a sailor.

Maude's father taught her to drive, and she passed this one on to me. (#1 was entirely her own, I hasten to add.) Which was good, because my father taught me to drive, too. This meant we went over to the Walt Whitman High School parking lot and I drove around in circles while my dad white-knuckled both the door armrest and the back of the seat. After completing a few circuits, he congratulated me, and I, who was unused to praise of any kind, forthwith drove into the chainlink fence.

After that, I went to driving school. 

Look where you want to go, and you will automatically steer the car there.

Miraculously, this works. 

If you concentrate on the nose of your car, you can't see anything else. If you focus on the road right in front of the nose of your car, you become over-aware of the micro-adjustments you need to make to steer, which can scare you with the unpleasant realization that you're operating a potential weapon of destruction and you can't possibly imagine you can make it do what you want. You might freeze. Or drive into a fence.

However, if you look ahead, towards the curve you're approaching, not too far, but not too close, your hands know how to get the wheel in the right position. Your brain takes over and your hands respond. All those things you need kick in, like depth perception, and the sense of the road, and the instinct for when to apply the brake and when to let up, and you just flow. 

Hey, this is the United States of America, where car and road metaphors have a long and prominent precedent.  

And this is my homily for today. 

http://pre.cloudfront.goodinc.com/posts/full_1309199215curvyroad.jpg

Getting in the Flow

There's a difference between appearing successful and feeling successful, and it's the feeling part I'm after. Of course the appearing part matters -- I do have various material goals. The main characteristic I'm seeking, however, is a feeling. Maybe it could also be called self-worth, or self-esteem, or self-confidence. I call it success.

Appearing successful, after all, is relative. Indeed, one of my friends described my life as "the classic success story," i.e., a lovely house in the suburbs; good marriage; good kids. What more could anyone need to feel successful? That's what I'm trying to find out. I could point out that what I paid for my house in upstate NY, wouldn't buy even a studio apartment in Manhattan. I might consider my friend H, who has a lawyer husband, doesn't need to work outside the home, and has a gorgeous apartment that is the entire eleventh floor of a prewar building on the Upper West Side, plus a home in the Hamptons, to be successful.

We all know plenty of stories, though, of people who have all the trappings of material, worldly success on the outside, but who are secretly tens of thousands of dollars in debt, secretly paralyzed by terrible marriages, secretly suffering with difficult children, etc, etc.

A corollary is the person, like my friend R, who has excelled on the worldly success level, but announces that she never feels totally satisfied with herself. She stands on her tiptoes, raises her hand way above her head, and says, "I always expect this of myself," then lowers her hand to chin level, "and I always feel I end up like this."  Or the Pulitzer Prize winning writer I know, who can't help feeling bothered when a book of his doesn't get reviewed in the New York Times.

So it's the feeling of success I'm searching for. My sister, a psychoanalyst, describes feeling successful as being in a state of flow. I've come across the term, defined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (No, I can't pronounce it -- but my sister can.) In brief, flow is a state of immersed, energetic focus on a task. The work must be intrinsically rewarding, and balance between being challenging, but not too challenging.  In flow, a person is emotionally and intellectually engaged, working hard, but not aware of time passing. In short, we like to exert effort, but rewarded effort, and when the exertion produces results, we feel successful.