The Arduous Practice of Achieving Expert Fluidity
It’s easy to look on as a highly skilled musician, golfer, or martial arts expert makes their technique appear effortless. That is, until you try to do it yourself! Only then can you appreciate that something that appears effortless is not necessarily easy to do yourself.
The Effort of Effortlessness
For any skill — be it playing the piano, tennis, boxing, athletics, martial arts, swimming, writing, coding, golf, or whatever — to appear to be effortless, it means that the expert in the skill has applied themselves to years, if not decades, of effort in training and practice. Nothing is effortless at face value — effortless flow is only acquired after you put in years of effort to achieve the level where it appears to be effortless.
Ironically, therefore, the skill of effortless living requires a whole lot of effort to get to the point where one can be good enough at something that one can do it effortlessly! “Effortless living” does not mean living a life of indolence and entitlement and expecting everything to fall into your lap for no particular reason! Rather, it means developing your life skills through practice and, paradoxically, effort until they become effortless. If you are good at many things in life, you live effortlessly. But actually getting to that point takes a whole lot of effort!
In earlier blog posts, I described such ideas as “reality surfing” and the “relaxation response.” It is easy to misinterpret these concepts, confuse them with similar-sounding themes and ideas, and turn them into an excuse for a pattern of behavior they are clearly not intended to endorse.
These ideas are not about promoting a life of idleness or giving up and doing nothing. If one is fortunate enough to be born into wealth and privilege, one might be able to relax and live a life of effortless luxury wherein one’s slightest whims are immediately fulfilled. One may be able to get by in life, turning a blind eye to human suffering and struggle. One may be able to justify having no empathy for one’s fellow human beings and living a blinkered life within a bubble of one’s own reality — if a fragile one.
However, that is not at all what I am referring to here.
The Philosophy of Flow
Some people appear to use Buddhist philosophy to justify living a life of callous, heartless ease and comfort, with no empathy or consideration for others. They may claim that this is equivalent to living with Buddhist “detachment.” However, everything must be taken in its proper context. If, for example, one studies the life of the Indian prince Siddhartha, who went on to become the world-famous mystic Buddha, the circumstances he endured before attaining enlightenment become apparent.
A misspent youth sheltered in the lap of palatial luxury, blind to the pain and suffering endured by the world at large, left the prince Siddhartha deeply traumatized when, at last, he confronted the ugly realities of life. This trauma drove him to abandon his life of material creature comforts and seek out the extreme austerity and hardship of the ascetic life in the wilderness, where he spent decades in the study and practice of meditative and monastic skills, including yoga, breathwork, and similar techniques. Buddhist philosophy emerged after years of austere hardship and exacting practices involving ascetic self-discipline and training in multiple skills and techniques.
The illustrious martial arts expert Bruce Lee advocated living in flow, with his famous quote:
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Living in flow, “like water,” is a lot harder than it sounds. It isn’t easy to be agile, flexible, and in flow. Indeed, Bruce Lee trained harder in martial arts than any of his contemporaries, eventually acquiring profound expertise in his skill set and even developing his own martial arts philosophy and technique, Jeet Kune Do. Thus, while Bruce Lee spoke extensively about the importance of relaxation, meditation, and living in flow, he did so in the context of a life dedicated to incredible training in the martial arts and to developing a near-superhuman skill level in his technique.
In a prior blog post, I described the skill of “reality surfing.” It is a mistake to imagine this to be an easily acquired skill and a quick and easy solution to all of life’s problems. The sport of surfing, itself, is a skill that requires years of dedicated practice and training before one can achieve a level of proficiency to rival the best competitive surfers in the sports circuit. Surfing is not something one can do on the first try — staying agile and keeping one’s balance on a narrow surfboard over shifting ocean currents is far from easy! The best surfers, however, are relaxed, fluid, agile, and are able to surf the most formidable waves with effortless ease.
In his book Relax and Win: Championship Performance in Whatever You Do (Bud Winter Enterprise, 2012), reputed athletics coach Bud Winter describes, in detail, the application of formerly classified relaxation exercises to boost athletic performance even at the Olympic level. Winter describes his deployment of relaxation techniques to enhance the performance of Naval cadets in a number of skills and tasks during World War II, as well as to boost the performance of Olympic athletes in a number of sports and pursuits. He describes:
Relaxation can contribute to the betterment of your life in many ways. Learning to relax can be a potent factor in improving how you feel, think, and perform — both in sports and in everyday life.
Winter, Bud. Relax & Win: Championship Performance in Whatever You Do. Bud Winter Enterprise, 2012, Chap. 1, p. 42
We know that relaxation has a place in alleviating disease, mental illness, physical pain, and many dysfunctions. The use of relaxation in treating pathological cases has been well covered by doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, physiologists, hypnotists and swamis. In this book, we are primarily interested in applying relaxation to healthy people. We want readers to learn to use relaxation to make their lives more efficient, more productive and happier.
Ibid., Chap. 2, p. 54
Thus, when I describe the application of ideas such as “reality surfing” and the “relaxation response,” I am not referring to living a life of idleness, repose, or inactivity. Rather, I am referring to the secrets of peak performance for highly skilled, advanced practitioners.
A lot of us imagine that raw aggression is the answer to all our problems — that we can get ahead in life simply by channeling all our energy towards a brute-force implementation of our simplistic goals. However, at the level of peak performance, it has been demonstrated time and again that raw aggression is not the answer. Rather, paradoxically, being only 80% invested in whatever you are doing invariably gets you a better outcome than being 100% committed to it. Taking things less seriously in life invariably yields better outcomes than seeing them as a matter of life or death. Paradox is the essence of life, at its deepest levels — any Buddhist philosopher or quantum physicist will attest to this!
Having trained and competed in boxing and Shotokan karate to modest levels in my younger days, I can attest that both athletic pursuits involve rigorous training and practice. However, the most highly accomplished performers also understand the power of relaxation, stretching, breathing exercises, and so forth.
Thus, the “relaxation response” is not about abandoning one’s responsibilities in life and living with zero empathy towards one’s fellow man. Rather, it is about finding flow amid the typically hectic circumstances of day-to-day life. It is about achieving the elusive state of flow in the heart of activity. It is about living with meaning and purpose rather than purely automatically and mechanistically, without thought or feeling.
The Technological Pipe-Dream
These days, we imagine that technology will be able to replace highly skilled human performance at various pursuits in life. But AI and robotics, in my opinion, will never achieve anything close to that level of proficiency, simply because skill and proficiency are not technologically programmable.
Indeed, I have a hard time believing that AI and robotics will ever be capable of performing even the simplest of life skills and activities that most of us do without thinking in our everyday experience. Activities such as washing dishes, doing laundry, or taking out the trash may be impossible for AI-powered robots to perform consistently and reliably. It is quite possible that you may return home from work one day to your AI-powered robotic smart home to find that the AI has suddenly glitched for no apparent reason and that you are locked out, while your home inside has been completely trashed!
This is for the simple reason that I do not believe that technology, such as AI, robots, etc., can ever replicate true human skill and proficiency. Skill and proficiency simply cannot be programmed into a machine — there is no shortcut to years of dedication, training, and practice.
When the ignorant, unskilled, and unproficient take control of society and organizations, believing that, empowered by AI and tech, they can succeed at levels higher than their skilled, proficient human counterparts, then the consequences are immediately apparent. For example, the disastrous first year of the second Trump administration is a classic case study of the rise to power of ignorant, incompetent personalities, empowered by an inordinate belief in the power of technology. The consequences have been nothing short of disastrous and will, in all likelihood, spiral into utter madness if not checked by the skilled and competent members of society.
Thus, the idea that reliance on AI, robotics, and technology can replace human skill, competence, and proficiency is dangerous. The only motivation for adopting this terrible idea is the economic one — cost savings. However, reality does not live up to the propaganda and hype surrounding this fallacious belief system. Even the economics of pursuing AI and robotics development are so untenable that the only viable justification can be the quasi-religious fervor of a utopian pipe-dream. It is unhinged from reality and will, very likely, produce a disastrous outcome for all concerned!
The Elusiveness of Perfect Balance
Living in flow, on the other hand, is about finding perfect balance in life — if only for a brief moment. It is that elusive moment in time when everything fits together perfectly and flows effortlessly — when time stands still, and one finds oneself in the “zone” — in the Zen state.
It is hard to achieve in modern life, and even harder to sustain. But, in the end, it is the essence of life. Being in flow is inherent in those fleeting moments that, ultimately, give life its meaning and make life worth living.
