The writing process gathers momentum by the day. It is what I love so much about this work. The long walks of planning, the hours spent checking backgrounds and researching topics across the different aspects of the story, give more space to the live, pulsating, and strong current of creative work.

When the originally Hungarian, later American father of positive psychology, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, coined the term ‘flow’, I am sure he was thinking of me. Or perhaps William Shakespeare had my humble person in mind when he put these words in Prospero’s mouth:

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

When I directed The Tempest for AdAstra Theatre in Jyväskylä in 1989, I was in a flow. Directing the play felt like being inside a vivid dream shared with the actors. A dream that reveals more than being awake ever can.

I was in that state most of the time when directing plays – unless I was too drunk after rehearsals with actors who had much stronger livers than the ones now, who go to the gym and eat healthy food. But now I’m drunk on the pure, ecstatic feeling of making the unseen visible from my keyboard, forming words, sentences, paragraphs, and scenes on my beloved MacBook Air and the unbeatable Scrivener I use for writing.

The aquarium of mind is an ocean

These words are – as I have used this metaphor many times before – like tropical fish: colourful, quick, and elusive, but beautiful when you manage to catch them, when I dive into the coral reefs of my imagination.

When I was younger, my creativity and imagination felt like a burden. Being equipped with this kind of perverse fascination with an imaginary world in the midst of the real struggles of life sometimes felt like a betrayal. Maybe that’s why I rushed from theatre to business: to make something ‘real’, like money…

But now, in my blissful – perhaps already demented – later years, when, statistically, I have ten years, give or take a few, left, all guilt about using my life on this imaginary ocean has vanished. What remains is the flow.

I can already tell you that I am ready to kick the bucket after three published novels. I have fulfilled the promise I made to my eight-year-old self when I read Jerry Cotton detective stories and Agatha Christie’s wonderful mysteries, sitting high on a thick branch of the spruce tree next to our house, hiding from the chores my vicious aunt wanted me to do: I will write stories, and I will direct plays. Both of those seemingly impossible dreams have come true.

Weird, eh?

Do you remember your dreams from childhood? I do. I remember them all. They were so vivid that I wanted to know where they came from, and at the mature age of twelve, I borrowed Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. I don’t know whether being weird was in my genes or the result of the strange dynamics of two families and one eccentric uncle running a farm in the middle of nowhere – me watching them all with awe and amusement. Nurture, nurture or caricature. Who knows.

However, being different was always my lot. Wherever I have gone, I have felt the same. Belonging is not meant for me – except belonging to my stories and the worlds and words I find in them. As an outsider, I have developed a way to observe and steal from real life around me, shamelessly, for stories that have always felt more true to me than anything else. Beati pauperes spiritu.

So, this week’s newsletter is about flow. I am in it. And I sincerely hope you are in your flow too.

Janus Lucky
www.januslucky.com

And here is this week’s video

The Boss is in the flow. And let that flow drown Trump and his thugs.

Get my books from below: