Life For Rent
If my life is for rent
And I don’t learn to buy
Well, I deserve nothing more than I get
‘Cause nothing I have is truly mine
— Dido
As kids, we can’t help but participate. Children have an innate ability to be present and engaged in almost everything they do. Their curiosity and lack of inhibitions help them jump in with both feet, creating a state of optimal experience and total immersion in any activity. Psychologists call it flow.
You know you’re in flow because it feels blissful and absorbing. Like magic, even. This state is characterized by intense focus, high engagement, and enjoyment, and happens when your skills match the challenge required of a task. Running and writing get me into this state most often.
Author, runner, and physician George Sheehan described it brilliantly:
Running is a return to childhood. It brings back the play we lost when we grew up. It becomes that magic place where the whole world falls away. It restores those peak experiences, so rare for the adult, but everyday occurrences for the child.1
Maybe it’s inevitable for those peak experiences to become scarcer in adulthood. As we leave childhood and spend more time focused on meeting expectations, we drift away from our authentic selves, trading meaningful expression and connection for conformity and responsibility without even realizing it.
Somewhere along the way, we stop participating in our lives and start managing them instead.
As a nearly empty nester, I can look back on the last two decades and see the Groundhog Day quality of adulting: get up, make lunches, get everyone out the door, go to work, take kids to activities, rush home, make dinner, homework, chores, bed. Rinse. Repeat.
As the “business” end of life’s teeter totter sinks lower, the “play” side rises beyond reach.
I didn’t notice when I moved from the center of the action to the sidelines of my life; it just became my new normal. I can see now that I started settling for passive consumption (binging Netflix or losing myself in the Instagram vortex) instead of seeking out active engagement (playing, creating, exploring).
This subtle but powerful change even impacted how I saw myself. I started to identify as lazy rather than an athlete. I stopped feeling like a confident player in my social life and more like a wallflower. I became someone unwilling to even change into a bathing suit instead of being the person who says yes to an invitation to wake surf.
Not only was I habitually choosing to be a spectator over a participant, but I was letting second-rate amusement replace premium flow. Without regularly engaging in engrossing activities that provided connection and challenge, I robbed myself of opportunities to feel the magic and vitality that punctuated my younger years.
Re-prioritizing activities that bring me into flow has improved my life exponentially. Flow has a compounding effect; investing a little time and energy into engaging, animating experiences, yields even more of the same.
Here’s what helped me reconnect with my flow:
First, I answered these questions:
What could I be found doing when I was 7 years old?
Biking around the neighborhood, spending all day at the swimming pool, playing ghost in the graveyard with neighbors, and making my friends laugh.
What can I do for hours and never get bored?
Running/walking, reading, traveling, listening to music, and telling stories.
What makes the world fall away?
Running, writing, or working with a team to reach a collective goal.
My answers didn’t seem particularly significant at first, and I dismissed them as silly, but they helped crack the door open just enough. I started by simply looking for more opportunities to be physically active, create meaningful connections, and clown around.
Second, I discovered my Sparketype.
Jonathan Fields has written a book called Sparked, as well as a test designed to identify “your unique imprint for work that makes you come alive” in the form of 10 “sparketypes”.
I actually took the test twice, because the first time my results reflected a way of being that felt forced, heavy, and overly focused on what I thought the world wanted from me. The second time, I responded based on what genuinely makes me come alive, and my results amplified what I learned from from the questions above.
My primary sparketype is the Performer, whose slogan is, “I turn moments into magic.”
Performers come alive when animating, enlivening, and energizing—breathing life, emotion, and sensation into an experience, interaction, engagement, moment, role, or pursuit in a way that makes it come alive with energy, emotion, and understanding.
That additional insight pushed the door open a little further, encouraging me to take an improv class, find more opportunities to write and speak, pick back up learning Italian, swim and run with friends, and uncover magic in the mundane. All are activities that land me in the sweet spot of flow, where I’m hyper engaged in a challenging activity that’s not too taxing to pull me out of the zone.
Third, I allowed myself to be a beginner and get comfortable spending more time in the learning zone vs. the performance zone. The learning zone is where flow lives, but as adults we spend most of our days in the performance zone.
In the performance zone, the goal is to execute well, prove competence, avoid mistakes, and get results. Conversely, in the learning zone, the goal is to improve, which requires experimentation, feedback, mistakes, reflection, and stretching beyond what we already know.
Paradoxically, the more skilled we become at performing and managing our lives, the more we can feel absent from them. But our ability to explore, create, connect, and lose ourselves in the magic of the moment never fully disappears. It just waits patiently until we’re ready to participate again.
