But Why Do We Know That?

Have you ever noticed how this feeling called love does something strange to this reality called time? Block out all the other voices and demands in your world, and see what your answers are. No matter the answers, they’ll be meaningful. Honor yourself by listening to them. Before you do something, love feels like instinctively wanting to do it. While you are doing something, love feels different. It feels like time speeding up. How, when you are in love with someone, time seems to both speed up and slow down, depending on whether you’re in the presence of the one you love. Before you’re with your lover, time drags and slouches, and each moment stretches out to its very limit. Then, finally, you and your lover are together. Your whole day together speeds by in what seems like half an hour. When you’re doing an activity you love, the same thing happens. You don’t experience the activity as a sequence of defined steps, separated from you, outside of you, one taken and completed before the next is taken.

The Song Remains The Same

Instead, the activity seems to meld with you, and you experience it from the inside out. As if it’s a part of you. It’s hard to describe this feeling, but we’ve all had it. When we are inside an activity we love we are enveloped, so in the moment that we are no longer aware of ourselves. You are not doing the activity. You are the activity. The late, eminent positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this feeling flow and said it was the secret to happiness. Rewatching his own highlight reel was his way of seeing and absorbing himself while in flow. And we all recognize it. We don’t necessarily need complex positive psychology theories to identify which specific activities we love. We just need to watch out for when our time flies by. When we and the thing we are doing become one.

Don't Hide Inside Yourself

Neil was more of an Aragorn. How will I know? I asked. Oh, you’ll know, he said. To be honest, I didn’t care about any of them. By the hobbits, by the Nazgûl, by the people they globbed onto along the way, by the entire mission itself. It just didn’t seem terribly interesting. You’re a Narnian. So, I tried The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Which also failed to grab me at all. Don’t worry, said Neil. Try The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. To Neil, I was a bit of a lost cause.

Nothing Like The Real Thing

To myself, I was a big disappointment. Maybe I just wasn’t a reader. I sort of stayed that way for the next few years. Yes, I would occasionally try my hand at a little science fiction, and yes, of course, I would read what my school assigned me to read, but reading for pleasure? No, sorry, not for me. I’m just not a reader. And then The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin landed in my stocking one Christmas morning. I was sixteen at the time and had dispensed with Santa yonks ago, but my young cousins were staying with us, so, with that little thrill of discovery still in me, I got up at 5 a.m. I’d never heard of it. It was now 5:25 a.m. My parents were still asleep. I don’t think I stopped reading the entire day. I was late for breakfast. But to me it was riveting. It is the story of us human beings as discoverers. It contains no dragons, no talking lions, no dwarves, and no Gollum. Only real men and women grappling with how our world works and how we came to live within it. I had never realized that the main project of early philosophers was to find out which parts of things stay the same when they grow and which parts change. Today it’s obvious to us that a foal will grow only into an adult horse, and no matter what you feed the foal it has zero chance of growing into a bull. But why do we know that? So why not a foal into a bull? This sort of stuff may bore you to tears, but me, I was hooked. And I had no idea why latitude was such a slam dunk, while longitude was a complete mind bender. Why does a heavy boat float, and when and how can you make it sink? Why do all creation myths around the world have such striking similarities? Why does every human society ritualize death? These questions were, for me, as breathtaking as anything that Frodo might be doing with his ring. They drew me in, and encircled me, and then lifted me up and transported me back to ancient Alexandria, to London during the Great Fire of 1666, to Marie Curie and her fatal laboratory. I was a reader after all. Just not a reader of fiction. You’ll have activities like this. Activities where you disappear within them, and time flies by. Some of these threads are black, white, gray, brown, emotionally meager, a little up, a little down, don’t do much to move the needle. But some of them are red. Red threads are made of a very different material. They appear to be extremely positively charged. You find yourself instinctively wanting to pull on these threads. And when you do, your life feels easier, more natural, time rushes by. These threads are the source of your Wyrd, your uniqueness, felt and then expressed in certain activities. Not everyone who excels in the same role shares the same red threads. It almost sounds strange, I know, but I actually love it when an angry guest marches up to the front desk. I find my brain works faster, my adrenaline pumping, it feels amazing, like I’m on edge, but loving it. It’s hard because you’ve got all these different personalities, different schedules, different roles, and somehow I’ve got to arrange it all so that you’ve got the right people doing the right things at the right time too.