The Moment the Self Disappears

On swing: the boat goes fastest when no one in it is watching themselves row.

The boat runs between strokes

What follows is a constructed scene, built from forty years of rowing in some form and from the way rowers talk about these mornings. It is not a report of one day. It is the shape many days share.

Imagine eight people in a boat at first light. The water is flat. The first ten minutes are work. The catch is ragged. Someone in the bow is rushing the slide. You are aware of everything: your hands, the back in front of you, the coxswain's voice, and a small private worry that you are the one making it rough.

Then, in the middle of a piece, without anyone calling it, the boat changes. The blades go in together. The hull lifts and runs out under you between strokes, and on the recovery you can feel it keep going, the way a bike keeps rolling after you stop pedaling. The sound changes. Eight blades make one sound instead of a rattle. Rowers call this swing.

Here is the strange part. In those strokes you are not checking your hands. You are not wondering how you look. You are still there, but no one is narrating the rowing. There is the rowing. The boat, the water, the next catch coming toward you. It lasts twenty strokes, or two hundred, and then someone thinks, this is it, we have it, and it is gone. Noticing swing is a reliable way to end it.

This piece is about that quiet: what happens when the part of you that watches you steps back, and the action seems to do itself.

What the research can see, and where it stops

The modern study of this starts with painters. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi became interested in artists so absorbed in their work that they forgot to eat or sleep, and he laid out the idea of flow in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety in 1975, as the standard summary of his work records. Later, with Jeanne Nakamura, he listed six features of the state. Two of them are this article: action and awareness merge, and reflective self-consciousness drops away.

Sport psychology turned that into a questionnaire. Susan Jackson and Robert Eklund's Flow State Scale-2 has 36 items across nine dimensions, and one of them is loss of self-consciousness, defined as worries and concerns about your own ability fading away (Hernandez and Voser, 2019). The limit is built in: you fill it out afterward, from memory, because nobody can answer a questionnaire while they are gone.

The word "reflective" matters. A 2024 theoretical paper by Parvizi-Wayne, Friston and colleagues points out that researchers define this loss inconsistently, and argues that what goes is the reflective self, the narrator, while a bodily sense of self stays (Frontiers in Psychology). The rower in swing still knows exactly where her blade is. What is missing is the commentary. That paper is an argument, not an experiment, but it matches how the state is described. The self does not vanish in any literal sense. What falls quiet is the part of us that keeps asking how we are doing, how we appear, and what the moment says about our worth. It is still there, ready to come back.

Csikszentmihalyi made a second observation that I find more interesting than the first. Concern for the self disappears during flow, and afterward the sense of self comes back stronger (a summary of Flow). That came from interviews. The supporting data are correlational: people who report flow more often also report higher self-esteem, which does not tell us which way the arrow runs.

The brain story is the next article's (see No. 06); the short version is that self-referential regions may quiet while task regions keep working. A 2021 review by van der Linden, Tops and Bakker says the neuroscience is limited and the processes behind flow remain largely unclear (Frontiers in Psychology). Music shows how messy it gets: jazz pianists improvising showed broad dorsolateral prefrontal deactivation (Limb and Braun, 2008), while 20 guitarists improvising rock showed increases in some prefrontal areas and decreases in others (Tachibana et al., 2019).

And swing? I could not find a study that measures it directly. The closest work is useful and honest about its size. Cohen and colleagues had an Oxford squad do 45-minute erg sessions alone and in synchrony with five others; pain thresholds, measured with a blood pressure cuff, rose more after the group sessions (Biology Letters, 2010; British Rowing's account). It was a small cohort, on ergs, and three athletes went the other way. Sarah-Kate Millar's interviews with nine expert rowers and four coaches found that, where they could, rowers in a double coordinated less by watching each other than by coupling to the run of the boat, which the researchers called "rowing with the boat" (Millar, Oldham and Renshaw, 2013). Her thesis adds a useful warning: what is good and what is fast are not always the same thing (Millar, 2014).

Where the attention goes

Read it left to right: the body sense stays in both panels, and what changes is the narrator giving up its room to the boat.

Same quiet, different rooms

Every row below is a constructed example. None is a real person.

The parent row is the one I care about most. Flow is not reserved for experts. A father building a fort out of couch cushions can be as gone as a soloist. The last column matters too. The self that comes back has a job: the surgeon needs the count, the writer needs the editor, later.

The old names for this

Rowing has its own elder on this. George Pocock was an English boatbuilder, son of the boatman at Eton, who crossed to Vancouver in 1911 and ended up with a shop in the University of Washington shell house, building the boats and giving advice to rowers and coaches (KUOW). He built the Husky Clipper, the shell that carried the 1936 Washington eight.

As Daniel James Brown tells it in The Boys in the Boat, Pocock is the one who gives swing its weight. Swing, in Brown's telling, is eight men moving in perfect unison, a state that comes only when they trust and respect each other (LitCharts). Pocock put the mechanism in a shipwright's plain terms in his own memoirs. A crew that has confidence in each other can commit fully to every stroke. Without that confidence, he wrote, rowers hold back, never pushing past the speed the boat already has, then hurry the recovery to get to the next catch, and the hull loses its glide between strokes (Hear the Boat Sing).

The rower who does not trust the others starts doing extra. He hurries up the slide to be sure he is there. He pulls a beat early to cover for someone. Each correction is the narrator at work, and each one checks the boat. Trust is what lets the watcher stand down.

In the same memoir, as quoted there, Pocock wrote that the 1936 crew with Hume at stroke "rowed with abandon," and that their boat carried well between strokes. That June, Washington swept all three races at Poughkeepsie (HistoryLink). I hold Pocock's account as a boatbuilder's reading, not a finding. It sits close to what Millar's rowers described, though the words cross: Millar's experts used "rowing with the boat" for coupling to the boat's run, and Pocock used the same phrase for holding back.

The wisdom traditions found this quiet long before anyone had a scanner, and they found it pointing somewhere further.

In Sufism it is fana, the passing away of the self, which I wrote about in "The Vanishing Self." The tradition does not stop there. Britannica's entry notes that fana alone is often seen as incomplete. After it comes baqa, subsistence, a return to full consciousness. You vanish and you come back changed. That shape rhymes with Csikszentmihalyi's observation that the self returns stronger. It is not confirmed by it. The Sufi means a lasting transformation in relation to God. The lab means twenty minutes of arithmetic.

Chuang Tzu tells of Cook Ding, carving an ox for his lord with such ease that it sounded like music. Asked how, the cook says, in James Legge's 1891 translation, "The use of my senses is discarded, and my spirit acts as it wills" (Legge, via Chinese Notes). He has used the same knife for nineteen years and several thousand oxen. That is not effortlessness from nowhere. It is nineteen years of practice that finally stopped needing a supervisor.

Zen has mushin, no-mind. In the 1600s the monk Takuan wrote to the sword master Yagyu Munenori that if your mind stops on the opponent's sword, you will be cut. In William Scott Wilson's translation: "the mind that does not stop at all is called immovable wisdom" (The Unfettered Mind). The rower who stops on her own hands is the swordsman who stops on the blade.

The Gita goes after the doer directly. In Edwin Arnold's translation of 3.27: "The fool, cheated by self, thinks, 'This I did'" (Arnold, The Song Celestial). Krishna is not telling Arjuna to stop acting. He is telling him to stop claiming. The work gets done. The little voice that signs its name on the work is the part that goes.

Four traditions and a boatbuilder, one direction: the narrator falls away and the action goes on. The science points that way too, narrowly. I do not read any of them as proof of the others.

They are also not the same experience. Flow is absorption in a task with a goal, and it ends when the task does. Meditation trains attention with no task to win, and many of its forms keep the watcher awake on purpose. Fana and the Gita's surrender describe a lasting change in how a life is held, not twenty good minutes on the water. They rhyme. Calling them one thing would flatten all three.

A crew adds one thing the solitary traditions leave quieter. Swing may be what eight people rowing for each other sounds like from inside. Which leaves the question I cannot settle. In those strokes, does the self disappear, or does it simply stop demanding attention?

Where SportsFlow fits

Nobody can fill out a form while they are gone, so SportsFlow does not try. Its Flow area has a part called The Zone: a short report after a session, prompted by the session, not scheduled for a time of day. You answer while the memory is fresh, which is still memory, so the questionnaire limit from the research applies here too.

The Zone sits beside a Setup Score for the conditions and a Focus Score for attention. Together they make a Flow Readiness Index, and when a part is missing the index is shown as partial, not filled in by guesswork. It is still in development.

The rule I care most about is privacy. A coach never sees an individual's Zone reports, only a squad average, and only when five or more people report. The reason is this whole piece. If you knew the coach would read your account of disappearing, the watcher would come back to write it. The AI coach will never promise or prescribe a flow state either.

Still not enlightened, Orion