the flow

Thought y'all might find this interesting in light of my vague post yesterday about rhythm...

Athletes who achieve their peak performance usually experience something that has come to be known as “flow,” a concept introduced to the world in the 1970s by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is “a state of consciousness where one becomes totally absorbed in what one is doing, to the exclusion of all other thoughts and emotions,” according to Susan A. Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi, authors of Flow in Sports (Human Kinetics, 1999). “So flow is about focus.” In other words, when you experience that running nirvana during which everything seems effortless, you are probably thinking associatively.