FLux
To be in flux is to be flexible. When we’re flexible, we can bend to meet the moment. On the other hand, we might get bent out of shape, or even broken.
Flow isn’t static. Change is an essential aspect of what flow is. Water that just sits there doesn’t flow. It’s stagnant, and flow is about creativity, not stagnation. Flow simultaneously allows us to dive into creative process and to connect the ideas within our work to tangible patterns built through our physical senses.
This podcast episode features the insights of Brandy Agerbeck, Lior Locher, Sonja Kresojevic, Jonas Altman, Eric Christiansen, and Alex Millet.
Full Transcript:
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast that explores the wide landscape of subjective experience. Even when we use the same words to label our feelings, we can have different ways of experiencing those emotions.
Sometimes, we feel the impulse to resolve these disagreements, as if there’s one true form of an emotion that’s more accurate than all the others. Emotions are inherently subjective, though, perceived in different ways by different people, without anyone in a neutral, objective position capable of declaring what’s really going on inside of us.
The individual perspective is especially striking with the emotion of flux. Flux is a fluid feeling, often referred to as flow. Psychologists have tried to pin down the experience of flow, but that’s an inherently impossible task. To definition of feeling in flux is to be in between solid, particular states of mind. As soon as flow is contained in a specific position, it ceases to flow. To be in flux is to be between definitions, in transition, in constant motion.
When we want to maintain order, with everything in its place, flux can be frustrating. Within flow, the standard rules and certain expectations of more solid states of being shift under our feet. To be in flow is to be out of control.
At times, this easing of control and order can be experienced as a kind of liberation from the demands of a structured life. Alex Millet, Managing Director of Client Services at Brandtrust, describes such moments of flow as a lovely sort of interlude.
Alex Millet:
We were married in the summer ten years ago, and we knew we wanted to have kids and there didn't seem like there was anything standing in our way. But none of those things had happened yet. So, I don't know, it was just a very lovely sort of, now in retrospect, it feels like it was almost kind of like an interlude. You know, there's that period between, and maybe the interlude is a little bit of theme here because it felt like it was interlude between kind of the fun, youthful times in New York probably extended later in my number-wise age than it should have, but that is what it is. There was that time in New York and this was a time where, you know, we were getting serious. We were engaged. We were married. We were thinking about the future. But none of that, the responsibilities had started to pile up yet. It was just sort of thinking about those things and knowing that we wanted to go there.
So now that I think about it, it does feel like a little bit of a plateau in a positive way and interlude in a positive way, and in a funny way, maybe that's a little bit about what these moments that we get to grab together in the evenings now are. I have my mornings. I wake up before anyone else in the house and I have my mornings to myself to get things done or exercise or read or whatever. My New Year's resolution two years ago was to stop using that time to watch cable news, and my life is dramatically better ever since then. But that's my time, the time once the kids go to bed until we go to bed. We don't probably maximize it, but it's the time that we get to sit together on the couch and watch something or think about, oh, we should do something like play a game, but not do it.
Jonathan Cook:
When Alex was first married, he and his wife were getting serious, but they didn’t yet share the serious responsibilities of parenthood. Their moments together away from work were like a free time, full of possibility and unconstrained by things to do.
Now that Alex is a father, these free interludes have become more brief, mere moments he grabs with his wife, after his children fall asleep, before he loses consciousness himself.
In order to defend the remaining margins of free time in his evenings, Alex tries to enforce a strict bedtime regimen on his young daughter. She resists.
Alex Millet:
I experienced it last night. The long title of this emotion would be the unique frustration of trying to put a five year-old to bed, and it feels epic in that moment. It sounds little in its description, but it feels epic in that moment and I've been. So there's this sort of general feeling of the frustration of dealing with a another human being who you sometimes think has the capacity to process and rationalize and understand and respond like most human beings you deal with on a day to day basis, but of course, it does not, and has that just the insanely unintentional but still very deceptive and cruel trick of seeming like they're that kind of person much of the time, but then reverting to what is actually their human nature as a five year-old from time to time, usually in very, very inconvenient times.
So, the one that I'm thinking of in particular is that every once in a while, not the sort of general annoyance or frustration of trying to get a five year-old to go to bed. There's a specific thing that my daughter is going through now. Bizzy is her name, that Bizzy the five year-old daughter is going through now where she can't stop herself. She can't help herself from asking about fifty questions at bedtime, or more importantly, more like about 10 questions, but again and again and again. So, it adds up to the point of that after we closed the door and have said for the hundredth time how, “Bizzy, you really can't say anything now we've closed the door. This is the boundary. This is the moment. Now we're not saying anything more.”
She'll scream through the door. There are no monsters, right? No monsters are old women, right? She has this thing about the old woman in Snow White, the woman with that, that the witch with the apple, that that is her sort of the apex of her terror. Is this old, this old one with the apple. So, to say there's no monsters, no old woman, you set my alarm for seven, right? You put water in my water bottle, right? The feeling that I experience every once in a while in those moments is just this, it borders on it borders on rage. I won't say it borders on wrath, but it borders on rage of just literally having no idea in that moment what you could possibly do to bend things back in the right direction. It's, you know what? Your rational mind probably knows she won't actually ask these questions for the next eight hours until seven in the next twelve hours until 7:00 in the morning. But in that moment, you almost feel like that might be possible. Is there any way to make this stop and to help her see that this is not okay?
Jonathan Cook:
There is unpredictability at bedtime for both Alex and his daughter Bizzy, because bedtime is a moment of transition between two different kinds of experience, with different codes of expected behavior. During the day, Alex and Bizzy are both expected to be awake and active. During the night, they are expected to be the opposite of that, unconscious and fully passive.
As adults, we take this arrangement for granted because we’ve been living in this pattern for a long time. Children, however, often rebel against their parents during these times of transition. For them, the switch between daytime rules of behavior and nighttime rules of behavior can feel unsettling, or even frightening.
Alex’s daughter Bizzy worries about monsters and witches. Something about this in-between moment of bedtime, as a transition between the day and the night, makes anything seem possible. Alex himself feels some of this uncertainty, temporarily consumed with the fear that his daughter might never fall asleep, but might keep asking questions all night long. After all, he says, in that moment, you almost feel anything would be possible. He desperately wants to protect the integrity of his evening interlude from being consumed by his daughter’s bedtime anxieties, but he feels as powerless as his daughter does.
What is there in such moments of transition between day and night that can provoke either a feeling of peaceful freedom or a feeling of chaotic terror?
The fluidity of these moments of transition enable people to shift between different roles, but in their fluidity, they require the temporary surrender of certain rules and expectations that make the world feel predictable and manageable. Time is open and less regimented in these transitional moments, allowing the freedom for people to move, but with the unrestricted potential of this flow comes a sense of vulnerability. The possibility of relaxation and fun coexists with the possibility of chaos and danger.
To be in flux is to be flexible. When we’re flexible, we can bend to meet the moment. On the other hand, we might get bent out of shape, or even broken.
Alex refers to these moments of flexibility as a time of shifting gears. The terms of engagement shift as gears change. It’s in that moment of pause, however, that the chains can come off, that life can become derailed if we push in the wrong way at the wrong time. The very moment in which we can pause to collect ourselves could become the moment we come undone.
Alex Millet:
It can be hard in general to shift gears in life in a day, and it's certainly gotten harder. Actually, now that I think about it, I feel a little bit like the frog in boiling water. I feel like that it's actually really, really, really hard, but it feels maybe just kind of like hard because we've been going through this experience for the last year and a half or so. It just allows you to sort of collect yourself and give yourself enough of a break that you can actually consider what might happen next versus just living in that moment of whatever happens next, I'm just going to take it. I'm just going to take it and I'm going to do what I can within that moment and then move on. That's what a lot of the day is like. Sometimes it feels like a week, a month, a year, but that's what a lot of the day feels like, and I think an interlude can give you that moment of pause.
Jonathan Cook:
Jonas Altman found himself in a moment of pause and was cast into flux when left a teaching position in London a few years ago without being certain where he wanted to go next. He became a nomad, living in between permanent homes.
Jonas Altman:
I show up in the world as a deep listener, life and transition and business coach, educator, and writer. I lived in London for twelve years, and I thought there might be some other place or space for me to spend time, so I went on this sort of soul searching journey where I was nomadic for five years. So, I think that that was a, I call it an existential opening. I like oceans and I like water and I like nature. And I can work from anywhere. What does London have that other places don't? Then I was like, let's go find out.
Jonathan Cook:
Jonas navigated his way through this transitional time by casting himself into a literally fluid environment. On the waves, he found himself free from associations of his past life and his future path, focusing on the moment at hand.
Jonas Altman:
The ocean, surfing and the flow-like experience that I get of being in the water makes everything juicier. Conversations, food, writing, work, relationships, music, everything. The only thing I found that's remotely close is yoga, and even yoga feels like a lot of effort. You’ve got to move through the positions and you've got to be mindful, and maybe you come out of the class feeling okay. I am present and alive and open to what is here now, and surfing does that, with just being in the water. You have like danger. I mean, if there are sharks or fish, you have timing of the sets that come in. You have balance and then you have there's a wonderful movie of like the yin of the ocean and the yang of the mountains, which there's no mountains. But when you bring this energy and like this fierceness with calmness in your in your in your body, there's nowhere else you could be. You can't have any thoughts about the past and no anxieties about the future. Otherwise, you're going to eat shit and get into the tumble dry from the wave.
There's a reason why sixty-five, seventy year-old men leave their wife and kids or grandkids and drive for two hours on the Pacific Coast Highway to get an hour of surfing, which is maybe four or five waves before they head to the office or go start their day. It's a calling. It's a sense of belonging to a tribe. So, there's that part. But when it comes to the actual act, it's a solo affair. It's you and the wonder of nature, and nature is going to win if you're not in sync with it. So, if you use flow, not in this like psychological term of boredom and mastery or challenge, but just in rhythm with nature and the elements. I mean, there's times I've been waiting outside in Vancouver because I'm going surfing in two weeks. It is so cold. My feet are like borderline frostbite. Every time you duck under the wave, you get rushed. So, you don't even want to duck because it's not pleasant. But you go, well, I got you because I got to get the next wave.
Your mind goes into what I would imagine is there is no flight or fight response. There is a acceptance, and that's different because, you know, like, yes, there are some threats that, you know, the amount of shark attacks or surfing deaths are like they pale in comparison to like selfie deaths, death by taking selfies or by like cars, of course. So, if someone's like, why would you go out there? My dad's like, are you crazy? It's not crazy once you're out there. So, I don't know what it is. There's something about what it demands of you, and that it brings you into a Zen moment by necessity without you having to go there with a meditation. It's almost like it comes to you by just putting yourself in that environment.
Then, like, you're surfing, then a bunch of dolphins come up and then, like, a seal and it, like, says hello and it rides that wave. And you're like, they know what's up. I mean, it might be the equivalent of what people describe psilocybin experiences as being one with nature without needing the psychoactive drug.
Jonathan Cook:
When Jonas surfs, he simultaneously enters a physical and psychological state of flow, separating himself from the solid realities of the past and what he must become in the future, instead allowing himself to be present and alive and open to what exists in the present moment. The demands of the physical flow around him force him to focus on his actions in the here and now.
Like Jonas, Eric Christiansen is an avid surfer who cultivates an experience of flux by getting out into the ocean waves. Eric extends that mindset of flow into his work as a documentary filmmaker, interviewing the subjects of his films.
Eric Christiansen
When I have the honor of being with an individual doing an interview, I call it surfing. I surf with them. I've surfed since I was eight years old, and I surf with them. Once we make that connection, once we start talking, I try to get in the pocket with them where they're going or what they're talking about. And then I'm like this literally with my emotions and I'm like, oh, okay, yeah. And it's just like this connection. It’s exhausting for the individual, you know, reliving it. But you have if you have somebody that's truly actively listening like that and they call it surfing with them, surfing their emotions, surfing their story, you know, with that connection. It just, it's a beautiful thing. But it's also you're living it too, as the individual that's taking in the story.
Let me go back to my surf analogy of getting in the pocket. It's just for me, I'm a down the line surfer and any other surfer that was here, they'd understand. I'm not a strict surfer. I don't hit the lip and do all this stuff. I go down the line and I do what the wave calls for, for speed and for grace and for style. And, you know, with the wave, I’m getting all surfed on now, but you're coming up and you hit and there's a certain trim, there's not a better place for your board on the wave. There's a certain thing of and I call it mala, which means tiny in Samoan but I call it mala, and it's like you get it right, just trim perfectly.
That's going back to active listening and going back to deep listening. There's a place to get with the individual when you're holding the space and you're in there that you're in perfect trim with the that it's like it is like a wave that you're like and you have the style, you know, and you're like, Oh, okay. And it takes a while, you know, it's like, like us having an our discussion, you know, we kind of start out and now we're like, we're riffing, you know, and, and it's the same with deep listening is it's just getting in with what they're saying, getting in the flow, putting yourself in with your mind mentally and in a way, spiritually metaphysically with them, that you're right in that flow in that pocket with them in the ultimate like, okay, I'm with you on what you're saying.
When I'm in that situation of receiving their receiving their sacred story, I guess you would say. I know I'm in it when I only have to ask one or two questions that are all sudden they're taking off everything that I kind of wanted to discuss. And I when they say want to discuss, when they go through the whole, it just it starts to happen on its own, and it just it seamlessly transitions to the next thing to the next thing. That means also, though, you know, quite often I have my input. I, you know, I put back out and speak and then then it just keeps moving, but without me even nudging. The story just keeps going and going and it gets deeper, and that's when you know you're kind of in the flow.
Jonathan Cook:
Eric articulates one of the reasons that the emotion of flux works through the metaphor of fluidity. Not only does this emotional frame of mind enable flexibility in identity and behavior, it also involves a feeling of immersion in the experience of the present moment, as if one is floating with a figurative ocean of the moment, set apart completely from other aspects of one’s life. Eric explains that this feeling of immersion is so complete that the perception of the ordinary flow of time temporarily stops for as long as flux is maintained.
Eric Christiansen:
It’s in the post-production process, too, you know, when I'm editing. The best thing is I know it's going to be it's going to take four to five, that's where it's I can't go in and just edit for three hours when I'm working on a feature documentary. No, that's not going to happen because it takes me up to an hour or more just to get into it, into the world. But the best thing is when I get into that flow and it starts to happen, and then I look up at the clock and like, Oh my gosh, it's 8:00 at night. What happened?
Jonathan Cook
In the same way that Eric experiences the feeling of flux when he is immersed in his documentary interviews, Sonja Kresojevic describes the emotion of flow as a part of her creative process as a visual artist.
Sonja Kresojevic:
Around the time I went to Argentina, I started to paint for the first time in my life. I never painted. The last time I picked up brushes was in elementary school when I was probably twelve, thirteen, fourteen. I can't remember anymore. Just one day I said, okay, you know, there was some paint at home and some brushes. My daughter left and some canvas and I started to play and it was. Probably one of those moments in life and your ego, your mind goes asleep a little bit because you know there is nothing to risk here. This is such a futile attempt at anything. Right. You know, it's something that my mind knew I would be really bad at. There was no ego involved, and so all of a sudden, I was in this fabulous space of just creating. It was pouring out of me. You know, I would paint for seven, eight hours a day. The first month I cried after each piece, I had no idea where the tears were coming from, but it was such deep healing that anything else I have done, but also deep exploration of what happens when we create space and when we don't hold any story and the expectations and we give ourselves permission to just explore and see what happens. And so, I've been painting a lot and had three exhibitions last year, and I want to explore that space more.
There's just this beautiful flow of energy and creation that lasts for as long as it needs to last. You know, I feel like I'm channeling something. My hand does, something that I'm not necessarily connected to. I'm very visual as a person, so when I meditate, I have really strong images. I had them even when I did the meditate as a child, like premonitions of what's going to happen. When I paint, I see nothing. So, it's just my hand that reaches intuitively for a color, and starts to move. You know, it's very physical. I work on large scale canvases, so it's very tiring physically as well. There is a lot of body movement with that as well. I just feel energies moving through me and at the end when I'm done, I somehow know that I'm done, and I step back and I think this is when I see it fully for the first time, and it's incredible. You just feel such a profound sense of space. It's like your body has expanded energetically, and your heart feels so much bigger and you're full of love. And yeah, it's more meditative than any meditation that I have done.
Jonathan Cook:
As with Eric and Jonas, Sonja links the emotion of flow that empowers her work as a painter to the feeling she gets when she is in the presence of bodies of water. It is as if her artist’s mind is like an ocean within her overall consciousness.
Sonja Kresojevic:
It's very spacious. It's like being in nature. For me, the sea is one of those elements that's been constant in my life. I feel like a different person next to the water. And so, it feels like, a sea or a river, it feels like it's an endless sense of possibility and space and color and just peace. You know where there is nothing to do. Nothing to be. Nothing to understand. Everything's just right as it is. Pure presence, I guess.
There is a little island in Croatia where I used to go when I was a child, and then after the war, it took a long time. But we are now going back every summer again and my kids love it. After the first lockdown in 2020, we went and spent a month there and there were very few people on the island. It was just this amazing space of just being in nature, surrounded by pine forests, by the green bays. So, being on the sailboats and there's just this sense of possibility, where life flows through you and you are fully present and you don't need anything. It's very simple, you know, in terms of the lifestyle as well. Right. It's all about fresh good food, fish, swimming, sailing. You know, after a few days, you don't even have a need to talk much. You're just fully immersed in that environment.
I think there is just more flow. I don't know how to explain it, but when I'm in the city, I struggle in London. There are too many buildings around me. There's a canal that I go to. So that's as close as I get to some water. But that works, you know? So, I go for a long walk every morning and that helps. But nothing beats being on an open sea. It feels very cleansing as well. So whatever thoughts you have, whatever, you know, pain you carry in your body. I jump into that sea and it just feels like instantly everything is resolved. It's impossible to carry any pain, any grievance, any negative feelings. You know, everything just disappears.
Jonathan Cook:
Another artist who talked about her experience of flow with me is Brandy Agerbeck. Brandy specializes in the practice of graphic facilitation, and is the author of two books that have defined the profession.
Brandy Agerbeck:
My name is Brandy Agerbeck. I teach visual thinking. So, I teach folks how to get their ideas out of their head onto paper. It's a very abstract concept, but it's a very real and tangible hands-on skillset. And I love that we can make drawings to make meaning for ourselves.
A reason I love drawing as a medium is it's spatial and not linear. When we're writing, writing is fantastic, but writing is very linear in the ways words and thoughts and paragraphs and pages line up. When we're drawing, we can put our ideas anywhere we want on the page. So, it helps us show interdependencies, connections, notice patterns in what we're doing, and that it's every kind of choice we're making as we're either thinking something through for ourselves or perhaps we're listening to a speaker or a teacher, or in very weird work I have had for a long time. We're actually drawing for a group of people as they're working. Any time we're doing that, we have to make so many choices. So, we have to choose. What is it I want to capture? How do I distill it? Where does it go on the page? Is it a certain size or shape or color? In each of those choices we're making meaning.
My first book is called The Graphic Facilitators Guide, and that is specific to this very weird work of drawing for groups of people as they're having meetings. I was bumbling along, doing the work, gaining the experience, knowing that, understanding my work as a graphic facilitator, and I love doing it. It's very gratifying work. It's very intense work.
The first book came very, very easily. I basically wrote it and drew it in three months, about six weeks of proofing and editing. The second book took three years and was like wrestling a bear. That book is called The Idea Shapers: The Power of Putting Your Thinking into Your Own Hands. And the challenge with the Idea Shaper book was it was truly breaking down exactly what happens when you're thinking visually, way more internal, far more conceptual. It took a lot to figure out, okay, what I'm doing this, doing this kind of thinking, what exactly is happening? So, I broke down this complex skill set into twenty-four very learnable pieces, which I call the idea shapers. Now that second book, the idea Shapers, is really, really, truly the reference of my sort of pattern language around visual thinking and making it learnable.
Jonathan Cook:
As Brandy talks about her craft, she uses different terms to describe the non-linear mindset that makes her artistic work possible. It isn’t as if she doesn’t use lines in her work, of course. Rather, the visual lines she uses, like the lines of thought that they represent, are not direct. They move more like undulating lines of current within a vast ocean of ideas, working to connect concepts in surprising ways, in multiple dimensions, with dynamic relationships that don’t stay still, but develop over time. Brandy’s perspective shows how flow is a process that emerges over time. Flow isn’t static. Change is an essential aspect of what flow is. Water that just sits there doesn’t flow. It’s stagnant, and flow as Brandy sees it is about creativity, not stagnation. Flow simultaneously allows Brandy to run away into her creative process and to connect the ideas within her work to tangible patterns built through her physical senses.
Brandy Agerbeck:
Years ago, I used to treat myself like a brain in a jar attached to a couple of hands. But, you know, through a whole lot of good and important work about how, you know, we're all one whole organism, I've definitely recognized and noticed those sensations in my body, even though when I'm very much in the zone or in flow state, my brain just runs away and forgets I have a body. But I think it's that really being attuned to my intuition, definitely being attuned to my physical senses and just a whole lot of freaking practice, you know, there's just that, that I know that I've got a huge, huge I think I already said mountain, but like it's just this wonderful amount of having done this before and knowing that pattern. One thing that's so fantastic about experience, which you can't bypass, you can't skip, is the more experience you build, the more you can transfer a previous experience into the current situation.
Jonathan Cook:
There’s an important divergence in how Brandy talks about flow from the way I’ve described it. For her, flow isn’t as much about change as it is about accessing a fluid mindset that enables a kind of focus. So, for her, flow is distinct from Fluxus, an art movement that inspires much of her work.
Brandy Agerbeck:
What is the difference between flow and Fluxus? I think that. Fluxus, I think of Fluxus as, well certainly the reason I'm so like I just get giddy even hearing the word out of this context is because it was the art movement from the Sixties that absolutely turned me on to art history. I've always been a drawer, always been an artist, didn't have any particular interest in the context of art history until there was Fluxus, which was an art movement that was very much about everyone being an artist. Really blowing up the different the definition of what performing arts or visual arts were and also just a frigging sense of humor. Like not, you know, super stuffy, definitely a response against stuff, your stuff, your movement, movements. So, I think a Fluxus, what I love is it is about that fluidity. It is about changing what we think art is.
What I think flux is, I definitely think change, malleability, fluidity. When I think about flow, for me, flow is less about change. It's less about a shift change and more about being in just a very wonderfully intense state of work. I feel like flow state is different in that it's not about change. It's not necessarily about having to respond against something or change something. It's more about being purely deeply in your work, that sense of depth, that sense of focus, just what happens when that is all you are doing. You know, I think one of the biggest ways people try to describe flow is when we lose track of time.
Jonathan Cook
How can these different ways of experiencing flow exist? How can the emotion of flux be described by some people as the feeling that comes along with times of transition, while other people say it’s not about change so much as it is about a frame of mind that allows non-linear thinking?
The honest answer is that I don’t know. I don’t have an answer that reconciles these discrepancies. Further than that, I believe that if I came up with a simple answer that provided a coherent consensus of what flux really is, despite the apparent differences of perspective about the emotion, I would be misunderstanding and misrepresenting what flux is, and what emotion is more generally.
If flow is anything, it is moving and changing. It is fluid. As a little thought experiment, I want you to close your eyes and picture in your mind the place to the south of Africa where the South Atlantic Ocean meets the Indian Ocean. Can you see that in your mind? Zoom in on that. Picture not just a map on the global scale, but the waves where the two oceans meet. Looking at that image in your mind, can you really tell me where one ocean begins and another ends? Can you tell the difference between Indian Ocean waters and Atlantic Ocean waters? Of course not. A geographer may define a boundary, an invisible line between the oceans, but that line is abstract, a human cultural distinction that does not meaningfully distinguish between the waters as they actually are in that place.
It's not just the emotion of flow that’s like this. I believe that emotion in general also works in this way. Emotion isn’t a point of data. It’s not a particular thing with clear edges. It blends and shifts and melds. We have words that describe it, but those words don’t really define it. So, the ways that Alex and Brandy and Jonas and Eric and Sonja talk about flow have many aspects that overlap, but some that don’t.
It’s not my purpose in creating this podcast to create authoritative definitions of what any emotion is, but to describe some of the range of experiences that can exist within different emotional spaces. I know that this project won’t map out all the emotional landscapes that people travel through, but I do hope to establish that the scope of emotion is vast and varied, not something that can be authentically reduced down to just a handful of basic emotions.
What I’m trying to do with each one of these podcast episodes is to create a kind of crude fabric, woven together out of the strings of different people’s stories. To that end, I want to wrap up this episode with a short description of another kind of flow from Lior Locher, a German-born artist living in the UK, as they talked to me about the art of weaving.
Lior Locher:
With knitting or weaving, there might be two different states of something, but it kind of oscillates in between, and it might look like you're doing the same thing a thousand times, you know. The cardigan I'm wearing has like I don't know how many rows. So, you know, it would have looked like I was doing the same thing back and forth for two months, but it wasn't the same thing because it was a different row and it was adding, and some of it was the front bit. Some of it was the sleeve. So, I think there is the way how it becomes a practice, and you know, like practice with capital P because you're doing it so many times and there is kind of something in that and a culture associated to it.
Jonathan Cook:
Lior describes weaving as a kind of oscillation between different states, and if we think about the fluid motion that a textile is capable of, it’s not difficult to understand how this idea of oscillation relates to flow. Each thread within a fabric moves back and forth around the threads that it neighbors, imitating the undulating shape of a wave even as the relationships between these flowing threads maintains the coherence of the fabric as an object unto itself.
The invention of textiles was one of the first technological revolutions of humanity, so ancient that textiles themselves are the original metaphor of technology itself. It’s not a mistake that the words technology and textile sound so similar. They come from the same root word, techne. Originally, the concept of technology was predominantly associated with the art of weaving, not with electronics. To the ancients, textile techniques were a fundamental representation of what technology does, bringing disparate elements together to create something that can do much more than any of its parts are capable of on their own. What’s more, text itself is a derivative of the metaphor of the technology of textiles, as words weave their way back and forth across a written page of fabric-like paper, forming a fabric of ideas in replication of the flow of our thoughts.
Perhaps the titans of technology might be a bit more humble if they thought of themselves as cut from the same cloth as knitters and weavers, and might be more inclined to think of the value of their work in terms of its ability to bring people together rather than in its facility in concentrating power. But then, all work has value.
Along those lines, next week’s episode of Stories of Emotional Granularity will probe further into the sense of psychological immersion that many people obtain in their professional lives as we explore the emotion people in Denmark call arbejdsglaede. Arbejdsglaede is the feeling of taking joy in your work.
Until then, thanks for listening.