Filters and Flow States for Creative Minds
I picked up Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and How You Can Think Deeply Again in the hopes of better understanding why my composition students were struggling to complete even brief reading assignments, but I also found that his book had a lot to offer me as a poet and creative thinker. Usually I wait to finish a book before I start recommending it to others, but I started recommending this one at about page 150.
Hari lays out a whole range of factors—from air pollution to 24-hour news cycles—that disrupt our ability to focus on both an individual and a collective level (and he explains how our splintered attention threatens our democracies). What interested (and also disheartened) me the most, though, was his discussion of the way in which technology and media encourage us to inhale information at an unsustainably rapid clip (i.e. to skim everything and react with a hot take) and to switch frequently between tasks (sometimes under the guise of ‘multi-tasking’). These habits and the mental static they generate hinder our ability to work in flow—that state where we are so completely absorbed in a physical or mental challenge that we lose track of time and stop monitoring our own productivity and simply devote our full attention to painting a portrait or choreographing a dance or writing a poem (or even reading one). Flow states don’t just allow us to complete creative work, they help us to feel more alive and more contented; and Hari points out that our lack of flow has become a vicious cycle for many, leaving us irritable and prone to distracted doomscrolling. Depressing as his assessment is, it’s also a clear case for the value of creative practices—the time we spend creating in flow states helps us cultivate focus and attention, leaving us better equipped to respond (not just react) to the world around us.
I’ve written before about how poems need Frames (not Fences). What I’ve realized since then is that poets (at least those in the Smart Phone Era) also need Filters—ways of buffering and slowing the tumult of Information Overload that surrounds us. We need Filters not just so that we can carve out time to write in minimally disrupted flow states, but also so that we can make room for the vital invisible work of letting the mind wander and make connections.
My Filters right now include following the news on a weekly basis (not a daily or hourly basis), limiting myself to one hour of television per week, and keeping a weekly No-Screens Saturday. Your Filters might include a daily meditation practice or nature walk, an annual retreat, an app that cuts off Wifi access during writing time, a No-Phones-at-Dinner Rule, or designated quiet hours—anything that cuts down on mental overstimulation and helps you absorb and process all the information-experience-stuff that fills our lives with busyness.
Filters are the clouds that shade our mental landscape so we can tap into Negative Capability. They aren’t permanent bunkers that wall us off from the world, but methods for sheltering and recalibrating our minds so that we can see and hear the world more clearly.
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