I am an attorney. I was born in 1940 and was admitted to practice law in California in 1972. I graduated from Stanford University in 1962, then spent three years in the Air Force and three years in the family printing business before going to law school at University of California Hastings School of Law in 1968.
Over the years, as a lawyer and a human being (OK, I know those two words don’t fit together in some minds), I, like almost everyone else, have looked for the “meaning of life”, and especially for a less stressful way of navigating through life and the challenges it presents. I slowly developed a concept I call flow, and eventually began referring to it as “Life in the Flow Lane”.
After I arrived at the concept of life in the flow lane, I searched the internet to see if the word “flow” was in use in any psychological sense. I discovered that there is a book by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. The book describes a flow experience as something that I have previously heard referred to as being “in the zone”. The Csikzentmihalyi book is beautiful in its concept and very scholarly. As I understand it, it posits that (1) being totally absorbed in one’s current activity can create a flow experience in almost any endeavor, and (2) having a flow experience creates happiness.
Life in the Flow Lane is not just about achieving a flow experience; it is also about identifying and following the best and least stressful approach to whatever you encounter in your life. The least stressful approach may be different for different people; so, first of all, you should strive to achieve a very good idea of who you are.
I have found that the basic idea of life in the flow lane, and some specified elements of it that I will discuss later, are, to the extent I actually feel and practice them, very helpful in allowing me to “flow” through life in a dignified and productive manner.