So What Is It Really Like?

I was asked this question this week. The person who was asking should have been more honest in her inquiry. She should have said, "What is it really like for a person like you?" For this person knows me only in reference to my love of manual work and for my spikey and fierce temper. Lets just say, temper in reference to the Catholic Church.

However, I will give it to her. She was probably afraid of setting off a spike, and wished no presence to the temper.

'What It Is Really Like,' can be answered by the fact that I am listening to an opera while I write this. Earlier, I walked for three miles on a snow covered path that wound up and down, relentlessly through the woods. Before that, I happily pulled old staples and nails out of the beams in the basement. What it is like can be found in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book: FLOW. A person is happiest when experiencing life in flow, their flow. Time stops, and the experience of time is redefined. Merging, melting, and becoming one with the activity is felt, but cannot be easily described....

"But to change all existence into a flow experience, it is not sufficient to learn merely how to control moment-by-moment states of consciousness. It is also necessary to have an overall context of goals for the events of everyday life to make sense. If a person moves from one flow activity to another without a connecting order, it will be difficult at the end of one's life to look back on the years past and find meaning in what has happened. To create harmony in whatever one does is the last task that the flow theory presents to those who wish to attain optimal experience; it is a task that involves transforming the entirety of life into a single flow activity, with unified goals that provide constant purpose."

So that is what it is really like, I think. It is a period of setting goals and clarifying those goals so that my life makes sense. I have found it basically an experience of transcendence, getting up and getting above myself, my faults and failings. Which has only reminded me that I am afraid of heights. What it is like has to do with joining the creative force in order to continue the on-going and relentless 'evolution' of life towards love and all of love's desires and gifts: peace, contentment, enthusiasm, confidence, knowledge, hope, joy, trust, compassion, forgiveness, generosity, energy, courage and beauty.

What it is really like is that it is all good.

And it is making me miserable.

Actually, I am not that miserable. I am listening to Maria Callas sing an aria in a 1958 production of Lucia di Lammermoor. The character is in the midst of going insane, and she is singing from that place of immersion. I can not listen to it without crying. And that is what Flow is all about. Professor DeFrancisco refers to this as 'mystical,' and Professor Dunn refers to this as 'the experience of transcedence.' I am simply going to name this snaphot: 'A Saturday Afternoon At Linda's House, Resplendent With Kleenex Box.'

Tomorrow, Sunday, I am going skiing. I am going to cook an arm shank roast in the crock pot. I am going to plaster in the back porch. If I turn on Al Green, this is what will be called, 'nuclear.' Or as the Catholics call it: transubstantiation.