Or been so fully immersed in a task that all self-conscious thought has disappeared?
This is what Hungarian professor Minhaly Csikszentmihalyi called the state of 'flow' in 1990 and what Buddhist monks have called 'doing without doing' for hundreds of years before that.
We've all heard of artists getting 'lost in their work', which is the same thing. Michealangelo is said to have painted for days on end, so absorbed in his murals that he wouldn't stop for food or sleep and would eventually pass out, brush in hand.
Csikszentmihalyi claims that 'flow' comes when we're challenged by something that's personally rewarding. But tapping this treasured juice isn't quite that easy. You also need the perfect level of skill for the job at hand. Too easy and you'll become bored. Too difficult and you'll start feeling frustrated. And once the flow is broken it's tough, if not impossible, to find again.
Because we're only capable of processing a limited amount of data, the reward for focusing all our attention on on thing is that the distractions and stress of life melt away. Suddenly, we're free from the past and the future is non-existent. It's basically meditation for people who can't sit still.
Like an old bloke who spends all day building boats inside bottles. Or an artist who spends hours standing in front of a machine, vigilantly matching the colour of the oil paints it's producing. Or a sculptor who spends weeks collecting household objects and the organising them so they create perfect cubes.
Of course these guys wouldn't call it flow. They'd simply know it as that feeling they get when they're doing the thing they love most.
