Focus and Flow...

Although I am no expert on jazz, there are times when I enjoy the improvizational style of a quartet. It's fun to hear the well-played music and try to pick out a meolody from the notes. Some of the best ones sound as if the music that springs from the group had been written down long ago, even though the players are entirely making it all up as they go along.

It takes incredible focus for this to happen well. Each member has to be trully and deeply concentrating on the music that the others are playing and accommodate their own style and interpretation of the music to the collective "vision" of the quartet. Few people realize how hard this can be, but I'm not one of them. Largely because I am not a musician, I marvel at how four people can come together with four different instruments and make wonderful, unwritten music. It's all about focus, for sure, but even I who might focus on the music each instrument is playing, could not re-create the beauty of it. Even many musicians can't do that.

One of the reasons there is a struggle has to do with flow. There is a certain movement within the music and the players where they become so absorbed in the playing that the outside world almost ceases to exist. They come together, start off playing as if they are acutely aware of the other muscians and the notes they are playing, but then a magnificant thing happens...each of them stops concetnrating on notes and starts playing music. There's a big difference between the two processes.

If you have ever been so completely engrossed in what you are doing such that the time passes without you being aware, or the place you may be loses its significance, or the sights, sounds, smells and touch of everything has become a part of what you are doing at the moment, then you know what I mean. We get like this when we are doing our hobby, when we are intensely listening to another person speak, when we are emotionally connected to another person or an activity that shuts out all the rest of existence. Then, we are in the flow.

I have always been intrigued by something that is attirbuted to Einstein when he explained his theory of general relativity to a layman: Relativity is the difference between putting your hand on a hot stove for a second and it seems like an hour, and being with your girlfriend for an hour and it seems like a second. That's flow. We become so engrossed in the here and now-ness of an experience that we move with it all effortlessly. Just like a jazz quartet.

It is hard to get into the flow of life. Especially hard to get into and remain inside the flow of recovery in the early phases. One becomes so consumed with the details, the technique and the self-consciousness of what to do in recovery that they only play the notes ("talk the talk") and not the music ("walk the walk"). The 12 Step programs have a solution for that: It's called surrender. When I give myself up to the world - the good and the bad, the highs and the lows - I am surrending to the will of my Higher Power in my universe and this brings me almost immediately into flow. Today, there are times, when I am so engrossed in recovery that I not only don't think of using, but I move effortlessly through people, places, things, and situations with a focus and flow I thought I could never achieve.

Today, I play fewer notes of recovery and more of the music.

All the best, Roger W.