Tastes of magic

It was a performance, and a feat of alchemy, I won’t soon forget.

These awakening experiences are of two kinds. The first opens and reveals an indescribable beauty that is utterly new yet tastes of a strange familiarity, and then it closes again, leaving an afterglow that fades in hours or days or weeks, becoming a memory.

Everything Mihaly had described was there—the loss of ego; the loss of time; the sense that I was growing into something bigger than I had been before. Flow was carrying me through the difficult patches, the frustrations. It had unlocked my focus.

By completely absorbing our attention for a short and magical spell, it can relieve us temporarily from the dreadful burden of being who we are. Best of all, at the end of your creative adventure, you have a souvenir—something that you made, something to remind you forever of your brief but transformative encounter with inspiration.

about this exceptional state of the spirit and of the senses, which without exaggeration can be termed paradisical as compared with the hopeless darkness of ordinary daily existence, is that it has not been created by any visible or easily definable cause. This acuity of thought, this vigor of sense and spirit, has at all times appeared to man as t