A Life in Flow

Forty years

On Saturdays I get up at 4:30 for a six o’clock practice. College rowers and high school rowers, men and women, join the masters men and now the masters women too, and there are enough of us to fill five eights. The coach switches people between boats to even them out, which keeps everyone on their toes and keeps it playful. Mixing men and women is new for our club, and everyone seems to enjoy it. It is not about whether you are young or old, male or female. It is about doing no harm and pulling your weight.

Not long ago I sat behind two lightweights who were heading to Penn in the fall. The kid in front of me asked how long I had been rowing. I surprised myself with the answer: forty years. Two seats behind me sat a woman of sixty-three whom I had trained ten years earlier.

Afterward we all have breakfast at a coffee cart in an office courtyard near the boathouse, college kids sitting with old men, everybody talking about the piece.

I am just happy to be included. It is also a reason to train.

Four articles have taken flow apart: what it feels like, what tends to make room for it, how the weather inside us helps or blocks it, and what it means to let go. This last one puts it back together, and asks the question underneath the whole series. Not how to have more extraordinary moments, but what a life looks like when more of it is lived from the inside.

Peaks are not the point

Most writing about flow is written for people who want more of it, the way they want more of anything that feels good. Find your flow. Hack your flow. Live in the zone. I understand the appeal. The best mornings on the water are among the best hours I know.

But a life organized around chasing peak states tends to go wrong in two ways. The first is obvious: peaks are rare, and a person who measures every day against the best day will be disappointed most days. The second is less obvious, and it is the reason I want to end the series with a caution before I end it with a hope.

Absorption can be hijacked. The researcher Mike Dixon and colleagues have studied what they call dark flow: the deeply absorbing, time-dissolving state that some people report while playing slot machines. In a 2018 study, players who reported more dark flow also tended to report more severe gambling problems, and, on the more immersive multiline games, more symptoms of depression. Those are associations, not proof that one causes the other. But they point to something worth knowing. The features that make flow possible — clear goals, constant feedback, a challenge that seems just within reach — can be engineered. Casinos know this. Our phones are not slot machines, and nobody has shown that the same mechanism is at work in them. But the comparison is hard to ignore when a feed is built to be just absorbing enough that we never quite put it down.

Csikszentmihalyi saw this early. He warned that the energy of flow can be put to poor uses, and that people can become so attached to an absorbing activity that it crowds out everything else. That is why I have tried, in every article, to say what flow is not. It is not a reward to farm. It is a sign of something more interesting: a moment when ability, attention and feeling are pointed the same way, at something worth our attention.

Work

One of the oddest findings in all of flow research came out of those pager studies we met in the second article. In 1989, Csikszentmihalyi and Judith LeFevre reported that people experienced flow more often at work than in their free time. They also said, at those same moments, that they would rather be doing something else. Csikszentmihalyi called it the paradox of work. We are often most engaged in the very activity we are taught to see as something to get through.

I recognize the paradox. I have built companies, coached, taught and spent most of my working life using exercise as medicine with people managing illness and recovery. Not all of it was absorbing. A good deal of it was spreadsheets and phone calls and the investor rooms from the third article. But the hours I remember are the ones where the work stopped being a job I was doing and became a thing I was inside: a client standing up without help for the first time, a lesson where the room came alive, a page that wrote faster than I could plan it.

Teaching has always been the most reliable of these for me. It has always come naturally to me, and I suspect that is partly because it gives every condition from the second article at once. A real challenge, a clear next step, feedback in every face, and a task that matters more to the person in front of you than to you. The self has very little to do in a good lesson. It is busy elsewhere.

If you want more flow at work, the second article’s architecture applies. But the deeper move may be noticing where it already happens, and protecting it, rather than waiting for a different job to supply it.

Each other

Most accounts of flow describe a single person: the climber, the chess player, the surgeon. Rowing taught me early that it is often shared.

In rowing we do not ultimately train for our own interest. We train so that we do not let our teammates down. Something in that changes the second rower’s job. It is harder to sit in the boat grading yourself when three or seven other people need you to simply row. A good row leaves a crew elevated, liking each other for the rest of the day. A bad one turns into a battle with the boat, each other and the water. As far as I can tell that is true across every age and every gender I have rowed with.

It is true off the water as well. The conversations where we stop rehearsing and simply listen. A kitchen where three people cook together without bumping into each other. Hours of caregiving when there is only the person in front of you and what they need next. These are not always flow in the technical sense. But they share its center: attention given outward, with less of it spent on ourselves.

I have come to think that some of the most important flow in a life is relational. It does not show up on any watch. It shows up in whether the people around us feel met.

Perhaps love asks something similar of us: not that we lose ourselves in another person, but that we become available enough to meet them without constantly measuring what we receive in return.

Getting older

I am fifty-six. My legs file complaints every Saturday, and on some mornings I do not get a seat in a boat. That is the honest arithmetic of a sport where the young keep getting faster.

None of it has made the water less absorbing. If anything the reverse. At twenty, the sport is often about proving something. At fifty-six it is closer to taking part. The race against the younger crew still matters, and I still want the number at the end of the piece. But the deepest pleasure of those mornings has become the ritual itself. The quiet before the world wakes. The structure, the comradeship and the purpose that practice gives a week. The sense of belonging to something larger than any of us, and to the people who rowed that water before we did.

The research on flow in later life is thinner than I would like, and I will not pretend otherwise. One small 2024 study, published only as a conference abstract, surveyed 188 adults aged sixty to ninety at senior centers in South Korea. Those who reported more flow also reported more happiness, and for them, social and home-centered activity was the leisure that mattered most. It is preliminary, a single convenience sample, and should be read as one. But it fits what I have seen in the clinic and on the dock. Flow does not retire. It changes address. It moves from performance toward participation, from the race toward the crew.

Action without the fruits

Near the beginning of the Bhagavad Gītā, the warrior Arjuna freezes on the battlefield. Krishna’s counsel to him includes one of the most quoted lines in the text: we have a right to our actions, but never to their fruits. The teaching is not an invitation to stop caring. Arjuna still has to act. It is an invitation to stop letting anxiety about the outcome occupy the space where the action should be. That is the second rower’s job description, and Krishna is gently firing him.

Eight centuries ago the Zen teacher Dōgen made a related point from the other side. He taught that practice is not a means to some later awakening. The sitting is the thing. A good row is not a step toward a good life. On that morning, it is one.

These traditions were not studying flow, and I do not want to turn them into sports psychology. But they point at the same distinction this series has been circling. There is a way of doing things in which the result is the only reason, and a way in which the doing carries its own meaning. Most of us need both. A life lived only for the fruits tends to feel like waiting.

The autotelic life

Csikszentmihalyi’s most hopeful idea was not about flow states at all. It was about people. Some people, he observed, seem to find flow in ordinary circumstances that others find dull or hard. He called them autotelic personalities: people who tend to set their own goals inside whatever situation they are in, pay close attention to what is happening, and treat difficulty as something to engage with rather than escape.

I doubt it is entirely a fixed trait, and I am suspicious of anyone who sells it as one. What follows is a practical bet rather than a research finding: whatever our natural dispositions, I suspect much of it can be cultivated through practice. It is the same small skills we have met in every article, applied to an ordinary day. Find the next meaningful step. Look for feedback in the work itself. Notice the weather inside you without obeying it. Loosen the grip on outcomes you cannot control. Turn your attention outward, to the task or the person in front of you.

There is no magic pill in any of that, and no shortcut. There is old wisdom, ordinary work, and each other. Chop wood, carry water. Row the next stroke.