Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [73]
Although playing an instrument is best learned when young, it is really never too late to start. Some music teachers specialize in adult and older students, and many a successful businessman decides to learn the piano after age fifty. Singing in a choir and playing in an amateur string ensemble are two of the most exhilarating ways to experience the blending of one’s skills with those of others. Personal computers now come with sophisticated software that makes composition easy, and allows one to listen immediately to the orchestration. Learning to produce harmonious sounds is not only enjoyable, but like the mastery of any complex skill, it also helps strengthen the self.
THE JOYS OF TASTING
Gioacchino Rossini, the composer of William Tell and many other operas, had a good grasp of the relationship between music and food: “What love is to the heart, appetite is to the stomach. The stomach is the conductor that leads and livens up the great orchestra of our emotions.” If music modulates our feelings, so does food; and all the fine cuisines of the world are based on that knowledge. The musical metaphor is echoed by Heinz Maier-Leibnitz, the German physicist who has recently written several cookbooks: “The joy of cooking at home,” he says, “compared to eating in one of the best restaurants, is like playing a string quartet in the living room as compared to a great concert.”
For the first few hundred years of American history, food preparation was generally approached in a no-nonsense manner. Even as late as twenty-five years ago, the general attitude was that “feeding your face” was all right, but to make too much fuss about it was somehow decadent. In the past two decades, of course, the trend has reversed itself so sharply that earlier misgivings about gastronomic excesses seem almost to have been justified. Now we have “foodies” and wine freaks who take the pleasures of the palate as seriously as if they were rites in a brand-new religion. Gourmet journals proliferate, the frozen food sections of supermarkets bulge with esoteric culinary concoctions, and all sorts of chefs run popular shows on TV. Not so long ago, Italian or Greek cuisine was considered the height of exotic fare. Now one finds excellent Vietnamese, Moroccan, or Peruvian restaurants in parts of the country where a generation earlier one couldn’t find anything but steak and potatoes for a radius of a hundred miles around. Of the many life-style changes that have taken place in the United States in the past few decades, few have been as startling as the turnabout concerning food.
Eating, like sex, is one of the basic pleasures built into our nervous system. The ESM studies done with electronic pagers have shown that even in our highly technological urban society, people still feel most happy and relaxed at mealtimes—although while at table they lack some of the other dimensions of the flow experience, such as high concentration, a sense of strength, and a feeling of self-esteem. But in every culture, the simple process of ingesting calories has been transformed with time into an art form that provides enjoyment as well as pleasure. The preparation of food has developed in history according to the same principles as all other flow activities. First, people took advantage of the opportunities for action (in this case, the various edible substances in their environment), and as a result of attending carefully they were able to make finer and finer distinctions between