I am grateful to know what it is to feel flow. Flow is a surreal feeling when your have practiced a skill over and over. When the skill is perfected it is applied to a complex challenge. It’s mastery of such a complex challenge that calmly consumes all thought and creates a feeling of flow. Flow is not a constant thing. I have found flow on some runs. Chasing my first 14 hour Northface 100 whilst fit, light and skilful I found flow. Moving through the mountains of UTMB I found flow. Some runs there isn’t flow. Trying to get fit again lately it’s hard to imagine flow. You can’t force it to come, it just chases the flow away.

So Joy to me seems to be the skilled practice of happiness, and applying happiness to a complex challenge. I know when I start running after having a break everything hurts, the body feels alien, the breathe laboured the brain scatty. Happiness feels like this too sometimes. Life is consistent in its brutal reminders that it’s unfair. I’ve been repeatedly stolen from and lied to. I’ve lost large sums of money for reasons far from my control. I’ve been handed genes that steal my physical and emotional strength, and those who I love. I suffer from extraordinary fatigue that’s thick muddy blanket weighs down my busy mind. Because of these things I practice happiness. Not oblivious happiness but purposeful happiness. Happiness from caring, happiness from helping, happiness from my family, my work, my family. Mastery of happiness applied to complex challenges brings joy. Happiness in flow.

I am impatient with people that seek to find joy through laziness or fakery. It’s an unfortunate side note to being exposed to a shortened life. I have little patience for people behaving like joy should be handed to them. It appears to me that life is not a lolly jar and it does not owe us red frogs of joy. We owe it to life to practice happiness through hardship. To master it and apply it to highly complex and meaningful challenges to create joy for ourselves and others. Joy is earned that’s what makes it flow.