Short conversation with Margherita - flow state

Yesterday I had a conversation with Margherita, a person I know little and meet rarely. Margherita is one of those people that are really into climbing. I took the chance to ask her a few questions while making small talk and I feel like she provided some surprising insights.

Question number one, why climbing?

Yeah Why Climb?

I of course noticed that climbing is becoming more and more popular helped also by the strong roots in the Italian cultural substrate. Most people I talk to who climb tell me routinely go to the gym to do climbing, but the vast majority also does outdoor climbing. Mostly because it’s cool and, I suspect, because it’s free.

The question for me is why don’t I climb. The answer is pretty straightforward: my risk tolerance for this type of activity is very very low. Simply breaking a couple of fingers would be quite catastrophic, and so I try to avoid unnecessary risks for hobbies I’m not already into.

But Margherita makes of this risk an incredible reasoning tool. She talks to me about climbing as something where nine times out of ten it doesn’t go exactly as you think and as a way to put yourself in crisis and think about what you’re doing. And even that this outlook on life she managed to transmit, that is, this set of behaviors that climbing made her do, she managed to translate into everyday life. So basically not taking anything for granted, of checking everything twice, and of being able to find a path and adapt, are all things she managed to achieve and reuse from climbing. Which I think is very interesting.

Through climbing it seems that she is able to achieve what, despite never explicitly mentioning it, is the one-to-one description of flow state, something I’m trying to reproduce with moderate success, although I would like it to be an on-demand thing in my everyday life too.

What I mean by flow state and why it’s interesting

Flow state is that psychological state where you find yourself in the right in-between, that is, in the correct intersection between difficulty and concentration. Your mind empties and your movements are not fully automatic, but they don’t come from your ego. It’s that state of complete immersion in the present activity, where the perception of time is altered, self-consciousness disappears, and there’s a perfect fusion between action and awareness. It’s characterized by intense concentration, clear objectives, immediate feedback, and a sense of paradoxical control, control without conscious effort.

Bouldering

I thought that flow state as I understanding would be most likely to manifest for a climber more through bouldering, where at every moment you’re using a large part of your physical and mental abilities to continue and reach the next step.

What Margherita told me instead and that really really started to change my perspective on this is that her way of reaching this state (which again she never defined as flow, but which is really similar and I’m betting is the same) is that of the rope, where it’s not so much the single moment but the flow.

Coming back to me and you

To achieve this I think requires a huge amount of self awareness. The way I think is mostly on short moments of lucidity and focus. Imagining myself with constant focus has always been an impossibility in my mind, in my forming the way I think. This has always been a direction I thought unfruitful: that I could never reach the flow state through a medium-low concentration for a long time, but that the flow state would always be as it has been several times for me: a door that opens with a superhuman effort.

I’ve always seen it as a huge door that opens onto an ocean of clouds.