I never spoke to him. Though I wish I would have. I’ll admit I dismissed him as a lunatic and went about my business.
I’m talking about this guy I saw every week when I was in college. He would jog around our campus shirtless. That wasn’t the strange part. But this was: He would do it while juggling a basketball and a football. He’d run along the sidewalk at a pretty impressive clip, tossing the balls into the air with every step. He caught my attention not just because he never dropped a ball or fell out of sync, but also because he didn’t look like the typical person you’d expect to be running around doing circus tricks on a college campus. I’m not really sure what those people look like, but this guy wouldn’t be my first guess. I mean, he was an athlete. The guy never got tired. I’d see him on the way into class, and hours later he’d still be doing laps.
After I graduated, I never saw him again. The juggling jogger became a distant memory. Like a polaroid that fades with time, I recall fewer and fewer details every time he pops into my head. Was he actually in good shape? Was it a basketball and a football? What kind of balls did this man have?!? Okay, I’m sending the wrong signals here. I think I’ve spent enough time talking about his balls — I mean the balls he was juggling — and his physique. What I should be asking is: Was he even real? The more I try to remember the more he seems like some figment of my sleeping brain. Anyway, real or not, that’s beside the point. This week, I thought of this potentially fictional character once again. I suddenly realized why he was juggling. Or at least, I have a theory.
I live close to work now. So most days I walk to work and walk home for lunch. On my lunch break last Monday, I picked an apple out of the refrigerator. As one does when carrying a round object, I began tossing it in the air and catching it on my walk back to work. At first, they were gentle tosses. Then I got more daring. I started launching the apple, five, ten, fifteen feet in the air and catching it in my stride. When I left home, I felt dull. Unmotivated. Not thrilled to be going back to work. But when I got to work after this playful game of catch with myself, I suddenly felt an unexpected rush of excitement. I felt positive — reinvigorated.
Ah, I inadvertently wandered into a flow state, I thought.
Then it hit me.
Oh shit! This reminds me of the shirtless juggler guy!
I’ve written about flow before so I won’t go into too much detail about it. But here are the fundamentals: According to the website Medical News Today, when a person is in a state of flow they are totally immersed in a task, they may not notice time passing, know why they are doing a task, or judge their efforts. They are in a state of complete focus. The popular mindfulness website, Headspace, says flow is a sense of fluidity between your body and mind, when you are totally absorbed by what you are doing, and all else disappears. Flow state is a modern term for an old idea. Taoist philosophy has its own, much older, version of flow state, called Wu Wei. It loosely translates to “effortless effort.”
Most people refer to flow state in the context of sports, especially extreme sports. Likely because these sports push the body closer and closer to the line that separates ability from risk and danger. Usually, higher risk requires higher focus — heightening the state of flow and the euphoria that follows. More on that later. But you don’t need extreme sports to get into flow. We’ve all experienced at least some version of flow at some point in our lives. It can happen in regular life, in mundane tasks like driving, or tossing an apple in the air.
Writer and Flow Researcher Steven Kotler is the modern face and voice of flow state. He leads the Flow Research Collective, which does exactly what the name implies. Kotler does a much better job explaining flow than I do. The reason why tossing an apple in the air was so satisfying and led me to a flow state might be due to one of Kotler’s ideas: the challenge-skills balance. The idea is simple, he says, we give the most attention to a task when the challenge slightly exceeds our skillset. I would add a caveat to that statement and say: also, when we don’t know if the challenge exceeds our skillset or, in other words, when there’s a risk that the challenge could exceed our skillset.
When I first started tossing the apple, the task was easy. But soon I was walking and launching the apple very high, while also navigating the uneven pavement (thanks Houston) and the cars passing by. The higher I tossed it, the more uncertain I was about how it would come down, whether I would trip on the sidewalk, and whether or not I’d be able to catch it. If I failed, the result would be a splattered apple. Nobody wants that. This combination of uncertainty and risk (albeit small) lead to supreme concentration. I forgot what I was doing and became completely entranced by the flying apple.
When I got to work, I had no idea how much time had passed or what route I had taken to get there. All I knew is that I felt great. This is the appeal of flow state: it feels amazing and it’s extremely productive if you channel it towards the right tasks. The level of focus in flow is a form of meditation— a state of complete presence and also complete lack of presence. It requires so much attention that you forget your body. Thoughts go silent and movement becomes intuitive.
This is why I believe the jogger was juggling. If I had spoken to him, I am confident he would’ve told me he could run much further while juggling than while running “normally”. I am sure that after years of juggle-jogging he was a proficient juggler. But his ball choice was savvy. The shape of the football meant that he could never be sure which way it was going to land when he tossed it. So even though he was running, the football and the basketball demanded his full attention. This would very likely trigger a flow state, in which he wouldn’t be able to focus too much on his fatigue or how his body was feeling. Of course, he wouldn’t be immune to pain, boredom, or exhaustion, but by focussing so intently on juggling, he would be able to ignore those feelings for a lot longer. More important than the physical benefits of being able to run for so long, however, he was also training his mind. He was quieting the voices in his head and training his mind to hyperfocus. I didn't realize at the time, but I now know he was meditating in motion.
And I know because I’ve experienced flow states many times. I’ve completely lost my body while surfing, kitesurfing, climbing, and lately even while writing. I can remember countless times being so sore I could barely even walk, and then going out kitesurfing and completely forgetting all the soreness and pain in my joints. Then I would come back to the beach and need ice packs on standby. While I was unlocking the superpower of painlessness as a byproduct of a dangerous activity, the juggling-jogger guy was summoning it intentionally.
I am now working on entering flow not just in sports and activities but in more and more aspects of my life. Why? Because more focus equals more joy. The more attention we give to our lives, the better we feel. Flow is the pinnacle of complete concentration, but it doesn’t just have to occur in extreme sports or activities like tossing an apple or juggling balls. Flow can leak into our entire day, our entire week, or the majority of our lives. This is Chris’s First Law of Flow: Objects in flow will remain in flow unless distracted upon by an outside force.
Sure, I may have entered flow completely by chance when I was tossing the apple up and down. But there were already things I was doing in my life to eliminate distractions. I wasn’t on my phone while walking. I wasn’t listening to a podcast. I was just walking watching the cars go, paying attention to my footsteps and my breathing, and letting my mind wander wherever it wandered. This was completely intentional, by the way. I had been trying to design my life to limit distractions, especially in crucial parts of the day like first thing in the morning and right before bed.
I’m not trying to say I’m some kind of flow guru. Truth is, flow is elusive these days. I’m just a guy who’s trying his best to sift through the addicting, mind-scattering distractions of the modern world — and there’s no shortage that’s for sure. I’m as easily distractible as the next guy. What I am trying to say is, if we want to feel our best, perform at our best, and be the best version of ourselves, then — like the shirtless juggling guy — we must strive to live a life of flow.
Joggling!!
I really enjoyed reading this, almost made me emotional. I feel that life is almost a journey of finding the people, activities, places, etc. that put me in a state of flow where I'm fully immersed in the current moment rather than looking back at something or looking forward to something else. I think we derive a lot of meaning and happiness from focusing on a singular task fully rather than being scattered or multitasking on many different things at once.