So sit bolt upright
In that Hard Backed Chair ...
and get ready for some
Difficult Music
- laurie anderson, difficult listening hour, home of the brave
Of course that's a double irony isn't it? First the playing on the notion of easy listening with its antithesis, and then framing "difficult" in terms of a delightful and engaging (rather than impenetrable) performance.
I thought of this twisting of what is relaxing and entertaining with our notions of what can be hard or perhaps challenging to figure out. This, of necessity, lead to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's notion of FLow and Carole Goble's meditation on the relation of bathtubs, coffee and reading research literature.
In Prof. Goble's framing, she proposed (and i am dammed if i can recall where, but one of her madly compelling talks) that there is a paper reading polarity: the work that can be well appreciated with a glass (or was it bottle) of wine while soaking in a tub and the one that requires coffee at the kitchen table.
Since then, i have been wondering if perhaps there is even a greater continuum between or perhaps beyond these to opposite (or apposite) points.
I should like to propose that from time to time we encounter the double espresso, hardback chair at kitchen table, avec papier. This one is where one actually needs to make little figures to work out what the heck is going on.
What does this have to do with Csikszentmihalyi's Flow? Well, one might propose that there is the paper where one is at such a remove from it, it might as well be blank for all we can get out of it - or perhaps one back from it, we try and it leaves us standing facing into a corner drooling. I own i generally back out before i hit that point, feeling that the weakness is in me and i am not worthy. Yet.
THe other end of the spectrum might also be to be so bored by the insipidness that one risks swallowing one's own tongue in having to read to the end. One might ask - why would one ever keep reading? Ah! the review process brings all sorts of things through the door, does it not, that one cannot refuse.
I personally do not want to put either of the beyond states of either boredom or fear on this continuum. Here's why: my take on Carole's dialectic is that both ends are pleasurable. At the Tub end, one is delighted with being able to run along happily and feel engaged with an interesting process; at the coffee end, it's like having a great workout - challenged by not winded. I'd say even the double espresso with the harder chair and paper notepad is a version of same: one is still hanging on; one is working harder, but, like sprint intervals, more than once or twice a week might induce nervous system collapse.
The boredom or fear papers are not delightful.
In Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, he maps out where this state of flow happens: we are sufficiently challenged that we remain engaged in a task, and sufficiently challenged that we must pay attention to the task. He argues that if we are so over challenged that we cannot get purchase on the task, then we cannot achieve flow; likewise if something is so banal that it does not present any challenge, we are similarly left unengaged. This is not the happy paper experience. This is not flow or delight or a good workout or practice.
And heck flow doesn't always have to be comfortable - it's not all bathtubs and wine. Some flow is what in the Talent Code, Daniel Coyle talks about as Deliberate Practice: where one is in the uncomfortable place of working through one's mistakes with the intent to figure out what's wrong and fix it. Ask anyone who's twisted up over a math problem or a challenging passage in playing a rif, or bouldering a particularly frustrating path over a rock. And coming off repeatedly. Wiring in the rif is difficult. uncomfortable. satisfying. GOOD TIMES (after).
And so all i propose in thinking about extending or more discretely populating Carole's polarity is that just as there are degrees or kinds of flows, there may be degrees of wine to coffee, tub to table.
so far i think i've only encountered one refinement - the double espresso avec papier.
I'd be interested to learn if you've found others. For instance, what might be the sofa and X beverage type paper? is there one?