It.

Experience teaches me, however, that it is indeed possible to be in the moment. Often, immersed in various activities — in a classroom, woodworking, writing, reading — I have “zoned out,” have felt the so-called “flow experience,” that deep, subjective state, that almost cellular, almost mitochondrial hum of effortlessly embodied energy, where muscle experiences itself as motion, mind as mindfulness; that thrumming calm into which I descend and become other than that watchful observer standing outside myself. It is a state of honed sensibility so profound it disremembers itself, a state of wakefulness wholly entuned with the rhythm of a task, an inattentive attentiveness, a tranced alertness and focus. Cezanne captures this sense of vigilant self-forgetting when he describes painting as becoming a “sensitive plate” to the moment, so as “to paint it in its reality, and forget everything for that.” Even lowly, much maligned routine, which sent Thoreau to the garden of Walden and then expelled him with a sword of fire two years and two months later, can stop time in its passing. In its pattern of actions, recurrent and familiar, routine domesticates time, allows us to locate ourselves in it, to be on social terms with it, to dwell in it.

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