Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Flow and making order from chaos

I've been reading Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and am finding it frankly, quite life changing.

I'm just about done, I skipped a couple chapters that I plan on going back to finish, and I've read through the end of it. As a sort of note to myself and to anyone else who has read the book, it seems like a big point of the book is that life is largely about making order out of chaos.

That the work of humankind is to create order out of chaos. Making order from the chaos of the physical / natural world say, in the form of cities. Making order from the chaos of life's meaningless in the form of philosophy, literature. This applies to music, painting, dance, etc.

That many psychological disorders perhaps stem from this inability to make order from chaos. That by making order from the chaos, one can achieve psychological balance.

Now, I write all this with Csikszantmihalyi's praise of and warnings for the amateur. I am not a trained or professional philosopher or psychologist. At best, I am a dilettante.

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