“The fact is, the heart and mind aren’t always friendly. And in my case, they’re barely speaking.” — ALYSON NOEL
A class clown from the 1960s might smile to hear how long one of his wisecracks has lasted.
It came in a geography lesson when the teacher asked the class, “What zone are we in?” In a spooky voice straight from TV, the clown replied, “The Twilight Zone.”
His classmate, my next-door neighbor, loved it and brought the story home. I’ve never forgotten it.
Rod Serling might have loved hearing it as well. Serling had created “The Twilight Zone,” a place he called “the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition…”
In this world, a freak event — like a coin landing on its edge — could send his characters into a world of fear and wonder.
You can’t help but picture Serling at his desk, fighting a deadline that never eased. He likely found a zone of his own, in which nothing mattered except getting the story out of his head and onto the page.
If so, he experienced a zone of a different type, one known to great performers, in which time slows down and skill flows. Artists know it. Musicians know it. So do writers, architects, anyone who creates.
Tennis pioneer Billie Jean King said of the zone, “It’s a perfect combination of violent action taking place in an atmosphere of total tranquility…”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” says of this state, “The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.”
Top performers use phrases like “time slows down,” “full connection,” and “total focus” to describe the zone. They love this state and try to stay there as long as they can. Naval Ravikant, CEO of AngelList, hints that they need not bother. “Flow is always there,” he said. “You’re just in the way.”
If flow exists, and you could get out of the way, could you find flow to practice as well as to perform? At first it sounds like an idea that could work. You dive deep into practice, your ego melts, time slips away, and improvement flows.
Here, however, the practice zone and the perform zone split. When you perform in a flow state, results come with ease. You hurtle down the rapids, one move from disaster yet in total control. Each touch of the paddle finds you at one with the water. Rocks and waves come at you in slow motion. You feel the spray and the pounding as if in a dream.
In practice, things should never flow. You find yourself on a mountain, one trudging foot at a time. Rocks tumble from above. You slip, fall, bleed, and the higher you go, the more you must fight for air. Each rep should put the task just out of your reach.
“If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area,” said rocker David Bowie. “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in.”
No matter how much practice and the game, may differ, you’ll need union of body, mind, heart, and spirit in both. You don’t want to find yourself like Vincent van Gogh, who said, “I put my heart and my soul into my work, and I have lost my mind in the process.”
Unlike in the above quote by Alyson Noel, award-winning author of young adult fiction, you must make peace among heart and mind so that together they can help put you in a zone far more strange than Rod Serling’s.
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