Deaf and Flow
Some of you know what flow is; some don’t. Flow: A psychological state of mind where a person is in peak performance while undergoing a task. They get lost in time, and alertness heightened, shear focus, a sense of euphoric feeling, accomplishing the “impossible.” It was first brought to light by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Me-high Chick-sent-me-high (yes, that is his name) with over 50 years of research. Flow existed for more than thousands of years. There was just no word to describe the state of consciousness.
Deaf people and I have one less sense; we just don’t hear with our ears. Yet we can feel the vibrations that travel in the air. Those vibrations are called sound. Sound hits the body, hits the hairs on the body, vibrates through the body with the absence of hearing from the ear. Deaf people can feel the sounds travel in their bodies, just as sound travels through the ear canal into the cochlea to the tiny hairs that pick it up and send signals to the brain — same thing with Deaf people’s bodies.
“Flow naturally transforms a weakling into a muscleman, a sketcher into an artist, a dancer into a ballerina, a plodder into a sprinter, an ordinary person into someone extraordinary. Everything you do, you do better in flow, from baking a chocolate cake to planning a vacation to solving a differential equation to writing a business plan to playing tennis to making love. Flow is the doorway to the ‘more’ most of us seak. Rather than telling ourselves to get used to it, that’s all there is, instead learn to enter into flow. there you will find, in manageable doses, all the ‘more’ you need.” — Harvard Medical school psychiatrist Ned Hallowell said in Steven Kotler’s book,The Rise of Superman
While growing up an athlete, rode bikes, cheap Walmart snowboards, and skateboards. I also played a lot of soccer, and I had a high potential to be a very exceptional soccer player, it never happened. I was more interested in jumping in the mud on a rainy soccer day, only scored one goal of all my league games growing up. Soccer in high school did not excite me at all; I did not play at all. Soccer picked up again when I got into college that had a deaf program.
My first ski trip was on the ski hills outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, at Perfect North Slopes in Indiana with my aunt buying a lift pass and renting some skis. An hour or two later, my aunt just could not bear the cold and decided to stay in the lounge; her hands get pretty bad in the cold. In the ski intro class, I could not understand anything at all because I had to read the lips of the instructor. I would finish the day skiing all by myself, learning from people watching down the lifts from above using just my eyes, watching every movement of the body and skis. Flow turned someone who was deaf like me into a capable skier.
My siblings and I would go on the ski hill after school, on the weekends, and for New Year’s Eve. It would be just us and nobody else, you know it, we had a lot of fun, just bombing the hills, rip the trees up, challenging ourselves, and pushing each other’s limits.
“Researchers recently coined the phrase ‘Twenty-First Century Skills’ to describe those myriad abilities our children need to thrive in this entry- abilities not currently taught in school, but desperately needed in society. Action and adventure sports demand them all.” — Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman.
I could not hear the sounds of skis hitting the rails, poles clanging against each other, chairlifts churning and clanking, whoo-hoos on the mountain or after a jump, people laughing at me when I messed up on a ski jump or a rail, none of it. I never heard many things; at least I don’t have any recollection of skiing sounds when I had hearing aids on my ears. Why not the hearing aids? They’re supposed to help!
Flow. That’s why.
In college, I had met some of my best friends to this day. We all related to skiing and action sports, and from there, things only went uphill and downhill to accepting a job in Aspen, CO. It was a privilege to be able to ski and bike on one of the most beautiful mountains in the world and bumping into Lance Armstrong at a party where a friend took me to. Armstrong had been showing up in my life on the bike trail in Aspen and a concert in Austin, TX. Flow did all that.
The “We of flow” is incredibly essential to the development of flow when in groups of people sharing a level of skill. Flow is achieved when alone and performed in groups; it is not all always about being alone and accomplishing things for yourself. The people around you helped you go where you wanted to go. If an earthquake strikes a city, a group of people gets together to rescue people out of the rubble of fallen buildings. It’s about the group entering the state together in group flow. I could never get to where I am today without the people around me.
“Since early childhood, Sawyer played piano. By the time he was a teenager, he was playing in groups. That’s when he first noticed it. “When you play in ensembles there’s a shift that can occur,” he says. “it’s an incredible sensation. The group finds its groove. Creativity goes through the roof. Performance soars. Suddenly everyone can anticipate what the other person is going to do before they do it. It’s an emergent property; a whole is greater than the sum of its parts effect.” — Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman.
Flow has made me completely 100% myself; I didn’t need my hearing senses at all to ski. The style from my skiing was defined; every athlete is unique to their own. My style is unique to my own, soundless skiing and biking in my mind.
When engaged in a flow state, anything is possible; you go beyond your expectations. If I and anybody could do it, you can, give it a try! The books I listed in my first blog post are suggested to read on flow The Rise of Superman, Stealing Fire, and Flow.
