At the risk of saying something obvious, given my previous work, I want to put myself on record as being an admitted, unrepentant flow junkie. One of the weirder revelations of my life came the day I realized that not only am I at my best in flow, but unless I’m in flow, competence can be a challenge. In my case, hacking flow isn’t just a strategy for more happiness and satisfaction, it’s a tactic for maintaining baseline adult.
All this is to say, I’m ever on the hunt for opportunities to find flow.
A couple of weeks ago, I was working on a book proposal about ebikes and because I have to assume my audience may never have ridden an ebike, I needed to describe not just the experience, but the way the experience resonates, how the volume knob on fun dials to 10 and this inescapable grin conquers the rider’s face. It can’t not be fun.
And that’s when it hit me: I was using many of the descriptors of a flow state.
I didn’t actually slap my forehead, but if I were to create a meme of my epiphany, I’d employ a gif of hand meeting forehead. Yes, sometimes we back into truths. It doesn’t seem quite as satisfying as boldly stomping into the scene and declaring our brilliance outright, but hey, how dissatisfied can I be with having realized I have an easy-to-access opportunity for flow?
And by easy-to-access, I don’t just mean that I own an ebike I can ride any time I choose. I’m also referring to how this feels like a shortcut to flow because it requires much less effort on my part than reaching the state usually requires. Granted, an aerobic athlete is most likely to enter flow at a level of effort roughly 80 percent of our maximum heart rate, but that’s not to say you need to be going 80 percent to reach flow.
The question that this spurred for me, because I can’t pass a rabbit hole without descending it, is: Why? As in, what is it about the ebike experience that makes it such a reliable shortcut? I considered several ideas but the theory I’m willing to tape to my front door is that they bring the zoom in a way that floods our senses. The environment zips past at a rate that doesn’t square with our perception of relative effort. That lower level of effort allows our senses a greater opportunity to soak in the sounds around us, the smells we never have the bandwidth to process and the feeling of the speed as the air rushes over our skin. Without all that effort, it’s a different experience.
I’m not going to charge that it’s a better experience, though. Flow emerges from the balance between two poles: challenge and ability. The greater the challenge, the greater the ability necessary to enter flow. Put another way, the flow I get from descending singletrack on my mountain bike carries much greater intensity than the flow I get as I carve turns on my neighborhood streets aboard my cargo ebike. It’s okay if you just muttered, “Duh.”
I need to advance a caveat before I head to unplug my ebike from its charger: We build resistance to flow triggers. Something that gives you flow today may not replicate as intensely tomorrow, though it may do so again if you wait two weeks. That’s because as our skill grows, so does the challenge necessary to keep us in that balance between challenge and ability. This may sound like an admonition not to ride your ebike too often and … well, despite all the stoke-soaked surfers this side of Maverick’s, I can’t say it’s not. Flow, she’s a tricky quarry, but that’s part of what makes finding her so rewarding.
Happy hunting.