Can pot-holers illuminate ‘flow’?
Grainy photo of my dad in a cave.
It’s my dad’s birthday. Or rather, since he is dead, it’s the anniversary of his birth. Dad and I had lots of shared interests, including music – he was my Gig Buddy and Festival Accompanier – and gardening, both of which were sources of many adventures, near and far. However, there were three things that we most definitely did not share: his love of mulligatawny tinned soup, brass band music, and pot-holing.
I want to talk about this last one: pot-holing. Dad’s love of pot-holing taught me all about ‘flow’ decades before Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote his book, ‘Flow: the classic work on how to achieve happiness’. Dad’s first adventures with caves were when he was a teenager, returning to Derby with his mum to give his aunt respite from looking after his grandmother. At the age of fifteen, he was invited by some ‘local boys’ to go pot-holing. He never looked back. In later years, we can ascribe this to his arthritic neck; at the time, it was a new-found love. He continued to pot-hole whenever he was in Derbyshire, until marriage and small children took his time, money and attention. Dad worked for the County Youth Service as well as his ‘main job’ as I was growing up, and this allowed him to rekindle his latent love of caves. He went away a couple of times a year, with a group of ‘wayward girls and boys’ as the (Manfred Mann song says) to introduce them to pot-holing, Kendal Mint Cake, and the Blackpool Illuminations.
I recall asking him why he loved pot-holing so much, and his explanation is as good a description of ‘flow’ as I have ever found. He said that when you were in a cave, there was nothing else. The only thing to think about was where you were, and where you were going. Everything else slipped away; all your other cares and concerns disappeared as you focussed on what you were doing and where you were. Now, I have been pot-holing with dad, and I am not ashamed to tell you this was absolutely not my experience! I was frightened, claustrophobic and desperate to see daylight. Even ‘walk in’ caves that were suitable for novices reduced me to jelly.
I have recently watched an excellent documentary, called ‘Dave not coming back’ about cave divers in South Africa, on a mission to retrieve the body of a cave diver who died ten years earlier on a deep dive. The area is called Boesmans, and is a deep drop, narrowing like an ice-cream cone, then opening into a large underwater lake. When dad was an ‘active’ pot-holer, he told me that one in ten cave divers died on their first dive, so this tragedy was sadly not unusual, and cave-divers acknowledge the calculated risks they take on each dive.
This documentary’s participants eloquently express the ‘flow’ state of pot-holing and cave diving that my dear dead dad can no longer say:
“You’re in the cave, you’re in the dark, there’s your light. There’s nothing else”
“Sometimes people search in themselves for themselves”
“The closer you get to danger, the more you learn about yourself”
“It’s a free life; you can do things of your own volition. If it goes wrong it’s down to you”
“The drop; the serene drop. A plan come together”
“As I was dropping, everything was in tune, it was perfect”
These are such beautiful ways to express the state of ‘flow’, of being mindfully present and completely absorbed in the task, balanced between competence and challenge, losing all sense of time and all distractions.
Prior to studying for my Master’s Degree in Applied Positive Psychology, I did a ‘Well-being in Coaching’ course. One of the exercises was ‘mindful eating’, where one ate a chocolate raisin and savoured the flavour and texture by being mindfully present. I love chocolate, but I am afraid I find chocolate raisins a waste of good chocolate. The experience reminded me of Kendal Mint Cake; when dad first used to bring it home after a pot-holing trip, it was a slab of mint-flavoured sugar. As time and recipes progressed, different flavours became available, including chocolate covered Kendal Mint Cake. I felt this was also a waste of good chocolate, which I was reminded of with the chocolate raisin experiment.
Being mindfully present is one of the key tenets of Positive Psychology; being ‘there’ in the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s not the ‘toxic positivity’ of being happy all the time, but recognising and allowing the low mood, the sadness and the grief as well as elevated states, joy and love. So, on this anniversary of my dad’s birth, I remember Kendal Mint Cake, ‘walk-in’ caves reducing me to jelly, being introduced to ‘flow’, and am grateful he never took up cave-diving.
“You’re in the cave, you’re in the dark, there’s your light. There’s nothing else”
About Jane: Jane is a Wellbeing Consultant with a Master’s Degree in Positive psychology, the science of happiness, based in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk.
Jane currently has capacity for two new coaching clients, please get in touch by emailing jane@adoptingpositivity.co.uk if you would like to find out more
She is a Director of Autonomous Ideas Limited, founder of Adopting Positivity, and part of the collaborative team at Essex Family Law. She is also a trustee for Home for Good, Suffolk, and an Adopter Voice Champion for Adoption UK.
Jane is also co-founder and co-organiser of the Positive Psychology Summit:UK.
She is a Fellow of the Positive Psychology Guild. Autonomous Ideas Ltd, and the Positive Psychology Summit:UK are organisational members.
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