FLOW (part one) >>>> "So, this is me placing a stick in the ground and, to a certain extent, saying to myself and you: 'Fuck it.'"

Remember yourself as a child, with your friends, finding a new something, inventing a game? Then marvelling at the passing of time as you sit down afterwards; sweaty, thirsty, and exhausted. Shocked at the lateness of the hour, you have the inevitable discussion about how to get home quickly and whether there is any possible excuse your parents will believe. Time zipped by, you were collectively, in a state of mind called flow.

I’d describe flow as being in a cocoon of doing, a state of existence between you and your task. The game that you and your friends invented was just right. Its goals were difficult enough to be challenging, but easy enough to be achievable. In this Goldilocks zone you all lost hours absolutely absorbed.

The concept of flow was coined by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi in his book ‘Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience’. And strangely anyone who has experienced it is only generally aware of the fact after they have emerged from it, with a satisfied glow, and with no way of explaining exactly what it was. I wasn’t aware that I didn’t know what flow was until I listened to a book called ‘Deep Work’ by Cal Newport. My vocabulary finally caught up. I now had a name for this state of being that I'd remembered experiencing. It fell into place and made perfect sense.

Flow.

Everyone experiences flow. It is strongly attached to accelerated and enjoyable learning. When in flow you are fully in the now and at your best. Hours can pass without you noticing. Interruptions break the spell, so you resent them. It is a truly excellent place to be. And actually, if you think about it, being able to get an accurate handle on a state of mind, describing it in a way that can be understood, is a pretty big deal.

Imagine if we were somehow able to accurately describe all of our states of mind to each other. Whenever asked how we are, if we answered honestly, it would be like giving someone a window into our soul.

I generally view my states of mind with suspicion. They are an interchangeable subset of me loosely held together within this entity that is me. They take their turns to bat. They must do, how else can you explain that I can sit down to watch something, hate it, switch it off only to love it a month later. I have come to find this volatility completely normal, I’ve witnessed it in others.

All you need is adequate observation time and we all contradict ourselves, we are all revealed as hypocrites. We do have some core beliefs that we absolutely cannot stray from. Beliefs that have become us, as we’ve spent so long nurturing them. As for the rest though, our statements may as well be birdsong made in the moment, little more than whimsy. But these verbal farts seem to take on a worrying importance now, once they are carved into 140 character tomes of pixelated stone. They now proclaim what we are and what we stand for. They give us meaning, purpose and a sense of self-worth.

As a youth if I firmly stated my dislike for something my ego then had to hold on to that belief, like an immovable pledge in a personal manifesto, even as I began to understand and agree with an opposite or different view. There was no opportunity for the middle ground. That's how it feels now. There are millions of us nailing our colours to this or that post regularly. And though many of us do not have youth as an excuse, we take these words incredibly seriously. They represent us when we write them and we take ourselves incredibly seriously, we are important after all.

These words that are now so important used to be carried away on the wind, with no record but the few  ears that heard them. Now that importance  remains, and is referenced and quotable. There is no leeway. In a sense we are all now in public life. There is no such thing as a private conversation, a throw away comment. And if you choose to say nothing? Well, if you are of interest, everything is made up for you. You are this or that and never in-between. Somebody somewhere is always certain, and all of the switches necessary in the zeitgeist of opinion are happily flicked for you; on or off, yes or no, the choices are made.

We argue whether the digital world has changed us when on-line we have become as binary as the bits that create either a one or a zero.

It makes me sick.

If you hold this or that view it must be because you Conservative/Republican, if you do this you must be Libertarian, if you don’t do this you must be seriously religious, have an incredibly small penis, or a medical condition.

If you eat a burrito you are a Mexican, if you boil pizza you are English, if you even mention fried chicken in a sentence like this you are a racist, even if it is just to make a point. In fact just to be aware of that particular stereotype shows potential for intent. That’s enough. We got you. In fact we had you at burrito. In fact...

And if the opposite side get into power and you believe that your world view faces being challenged for a minimum of four years?

Really, I have never been as disgusted with humanity.Being in power means seeing the reality of a situation. This is the seed crop of compromise. The other side has to see the rabbit too surely? How can so many people be so disgusted at simply living through and watching a necessarily slow system working as it is designed to? Other people see the world differently. I'm sick of hearing the unsubtle sub text on every liberal leaning pod-cast or radio show that I listen to. "In these turbulent/troubling times" What a bunch of narcissistic children, taking it all as a personal affront. It is the democratic process.

This blog is about jewellery right? Perhaps I should get it organised. It seems to have boundary issues, I haven't mentioned jewellery much.  But this is all related to my work. Well, to this blog at least. Let me explain.

I dislike people not liking something on principle because of who made it, because of the views they hold.  It is this childish inability that many of us have to separate art from artist, product from maker, person from political view that really grates. It is the height of idiocy. It is petty. It holds us back.

Like:

• The guy who catches himself happily singing a song, and stops almost biting his tongue because the artist who sings it is gay, wears a dress and has a beard.
• The woman who ignores good advice about where her vehicle is parked because the guy who gives it speaks with a common accent and calls her ‘love’.
• The youngster that misses the opportunity of a lifetime when her work is complimented by some ‘stuck up cow’.
• A perfect scientific partnership that was destined to make our exploration of Earth like planets a reality never happening because of passive aggression from each of the partners peer groups.
• The person that becomes one thing in their life instead of many because when everyone else was standing up and clapping along with a song about the dangers of peer pressure, and their peers were beckoning, pressuring them to stand up; they stood up.
• The effective solution in everybody’s interest ignored because of from whom it originated.
• The effective solution in everybody’s interest ignored because to put it forward is to align oneself with the current ‘wrong people’and to do so would mean political suicide.
• The loss of humanities ability to view its human experience from multiple angles, as we are forced into accelerated homogeneity.

The point of all of the above is that this will be a blog about jewellery, and making jewellery. But it also has to be more than this for me to enjoy writing it. To get into a moment of flow where time stands still you cannot be worrying all of the time about what you are writing.

I worried too much, writhing this. That ‘s not freedom. To have an interesting jewellery blog it needs to have boundary issues. Otherwise I will not be engaged enough to write it and it will fail. So, this is me placing a stick in the ground and, to a certain extent, saying to myself and you: 

‘Fuck it.’

But, don’t you go letting that be your reason for not liking my work.