Finding Flow
- Vinayak Jakati
- Jan 24, 2022
- 4 min read
A part of you already knows what you need to do.
I heard Steve Jobs say something like that in his famous Stanford speech and it stuck with me. Not as an inspiring line but a dissonant one. Something about that didn’t click. How could that be possible, I wondered.
In May 2020, I got off a phone call one afternoon where I learnt that someone I knew and really liked was going to die. Having lost my father unexpectedly earlier that year, death, its accompanying loss and the endless questions were always lingering around me. This phone call triggered it all over again. A question popped in my head right after.
What if tomorrow was the last day of my life?
What would I regret?
In about five minutes, I made a list of seven or eight things. One of them was writing a book. I always knew I wanted to, but didn’t precisely know why, what, how or when.
Later that evening (or maybe the next day), I had a couple of long conversations with two people who know me well, but don’t know each other. That got me thinking – what if these two were to meet? What might they talk about? And if one conversation can truly change someone’s life, what might happen in their lives if they have such a conversation? That’s how the idea for my book was born. I figured out the what and when of writing the book.
The next morning, I was scribbling a sketch in my diary about this idea and soon it filled up an outline of eight to ten pages. The story I wanted to tell had laid itself out. Over the next couple of months, I wrote one chapter a day and it was the best experience I’ve ever had. Before I knew it, close to 90,000 words had arranged themselves in 54 chapters. Somewhere through that experience, I learnt how to express my voice, to expand it and also its limitations.
When I got around to publishing it, I realised what I really wanted to express in the book and that became the preface—the discomfort of being called by something larger than us. We have all felt that tug of something goading us to abandon our security and run towards it. Against all practical wisdom, we feel it will be worth jumping off the cliff, that we might even grow wings on the way down. We spend a large part of our life avoiding the edge of that cliff until life punches us in the face and we find ourselves at a place we didn’t quite plan to reach.
Inevitably, there is a conversation at the edge. One that may start with a friend or a loved one, but almost always ends with oneself. It’s a conversation about the dilemma and the choices surrounding it. To stay or to go.
The thing about such conversations is their capacity to take us over the edge without our knowing. We think we have finished speaking, but what we would have really done is taken a definitive step into the future. Into the unknown.
Sometimes, the bigger surprise is knowing we weren’t the only ones at the edge. The book turned out to be a catalog of such courageous conversations the characters have in their own quest, at the edge of their own cliff. At the end of it, they are not the same people who started the journey. Although a work of fiction, some of these conversations have happened, some others I wish had happened.
The plot, the stories within stories and the conversations eventually are beads on the thread of interruptions.
The interruptions of course are the punches in the face, the setbacks, the losses, the frustrations et al. We go through life hoping it would be disrupted tomorrow in a certain way (insert big positive outcome) but something else arrives the next day. We didn’t order it, but realise later that we got what we needed at the time. Yet, how we deal with those interruptions, how we show up in our own 3 a.m call shapes the trajectory of our life.
For me, this notion: that our life is a trajectory, a vector that finds its way through the unknown is captivating. It is about being in the zone, being in ‘Flow’, like a comet in the sky, blazing away regardless of reward or consequence. As a concept it has been chronicled thoroughly – from religion, philosophy to science as the defining essence of being human.
Today, I realised that finding my own flow was the reason I wrote this book. As vain and self-indulgent as it may sound, it is true. For me, it meant I found something I don’t need a reason to pursue for the rest of my life.
But that’s not the reason I wrote this post.
Once the book came out, it got some incredible support and goodwill from so many wonderful people—family, friends, colleagues, even total strangers. While I wrote the book for a certain demographic, our parents’ generation resonating with it has been very satisfying.
So, I would like to thank every single person – those of you who wished me well, you bought the book, sent me photos of it, wrote reviews, even promoted it. You did it with no expectation and with the single intention of supporting a friend/family member who went out and did something crazy. I will forever be grateful for it. It encourages me to stay on the path and your feedback helps me get better. Thank you!
Through it all, the messages I got about the book from its readers had a pattern too. I learnt that besides helping me find flow, it may have helped them too. That possibility, however miniscule makes the entire journey worth it. This is the reason to jump off the cliff.
Perhaps we do know where we want to end up and with who.
Perhaps what feels like the edge of a cliff is actually a bridge, maybe a really creaky one. An ancient part that connects this part of our life with that. And maybe, what we are really scared of is simply the thought of not looking good as we take our first steps.
You can see what people have shared about the book in this link.
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