A forgotten cup of tea

Image by Noelia Demaria from Pixabay

I recently picked up my old habit of painting. Several nights in a row, when the kids have gone to bed, I bring out my trusty old iPad pro with the pencil and start sketching. I bring a cup of tea to the table to complete the little ritual. It’s been over three years now since I stopped painting regularly and sometimes it is perhaps a good idea to take a break, because I am having a ton of fun now when I picked up the pencil again. I have entered the magical flow state many times lately. I know this for a fact, because I have found myself time and time again with a cup of cold tea next to me.

This means I have been so fully immersed in the activity that I forgot to take a sip from my cup, until the hot tea was room temperature. That’s a seriously good sign that you are in the right place at the right time. I have zero recollection of how long I have been painting but probably an hour or two. Time just flies. Just imagine if you could identify such a task that totally grabs your attention for hours, that you have a ton of fun doing, that you are actually good at, and that people are willing to pay you good money for. That is the perfect career recipe. However, to nail all four of these at the same time is not an easy thing to do. Chances are that if money is introduced into the equation it might detract from the fun side of things.

I sometimes enter this state with quadruple harmony at work, but it is rare. But to get it at all, is probably something one should be very grateful for. Because I suspect many people never get to experience it. Usually, I notice exactly the same sign, i.e. a cold cup of coffee is waiting on my desk next to me when I realize it is lunch break. Four hours zipped by like nothing. But there can be a flip side also. Sometimes it might be caused by excessive workload. You can be so burdened with urgent tasks that you just don’t even have the time to sip on your coffee occasionally.

What happens if we compare this to mindless scrolling on a smartphone? That is another activity that without a doubt can grab your attention for hours and making you forget about your coffee? Obviously, you will never get paid for it. It is the other way around; you pay with your attention – the most valuable currency that exists. But the final component is the most interesting. Do you have fun while scrolling mindlessly? Maybe it feels like that in the moment, but I am not so sure. The algorithm constantly promotes fear porn and that is not helpful, fun or useful.

In James Clear´s excellent Thursday newsletter I discovered this quote: French philosopher Simone Weil encourages us to search the root cause: "All sins are attempts to fill voids." Wow, that is painfully accurate! Another way of putting it is that good habits cannot replace bad habits unless you make space for them first. You must begin by removing things from your life, to accommodate a new and better habit. You cannot bring any more furniture into a full apartment until you get rid of some old stuff first. In practice, that means that saying no must come first. No is a very powerful and useful word.

We imagine that we have an ideal road through life aiming at a worthwhile purpose. It is all but impossible to know what this road actually is. Extremely difficult! It is orders of magnitude easier to identify the wrong choices i.e. the roads that certainly will not take you towards your goal and even more likely the opposite direction. So, let’s just start by not doing those things first. Then a space in your life can become vacant and now you can carefully choose a road that you believe will take you in the right direction. Even if you are wrong, you are still correct. Life has no reverse gear; it can only go forward. And that means you need to make U-turns sometimes, which means driving in the opposite direction momentarily while correcting the course.

I do not claim to know exactly where I am heading, but I have some idea at least. And I am convinced that when I discover those cold cups on my desk I am doing something correctly and should probably do it more often.