Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has died. Some part of my brain feels sure I read a book by him or about his work that wasn't about flow but I've never been able to find it again. (In addition to reading Flow, which I believe I also read around the same time.)
I was a young mom. I think I was living in Kansas at the time and had one child in elementary school and one still home full time, not yet old enough for school.
The book talked about our psychological relationship to time. It detailed a study in which people were asked to write a timeline of their lives including important milestones past, present and future.
Men typically listed future events like "I will retire" followed by "...and then I will finally buy that boat I have always wanted!" Women typically listed future events that were all endings with no new beginnings: One by one, everyone they loved would leave them, either by growing up and moving away or dying if they were older.
That latter pattern of timeline -- where the future was percieved of as filled with nothing but endings and those endings were about other people, not personal choices like when to retire -- was strongly associated with depression.
With reading that, I immediately decided to begin making plans for a future for myself.
I decided I was not going to become some empty-nester mom feeling abandoned by my children. I was going to be a mom excitedly looking forward to things I could finally do now that the kids no longer took all my time.
I think I fairly promptly enrolled in college and took a class or two and began making plans for an education and a career and a future of my own as a person in my own right and not just as someone's wife or someone's mom.
It's possible I'm just misremembering the author and it was someone else's work, not that of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. Either way, his work was important and influential. May he rest in peace.
I was a young mom. I think I was living in Kansas at the time and had one child in elementary school and one still home full time, not yet old enough for school.
The book talked about our psychological relationship to time. It detailed a study in which people were asked to write a timeline of their lives including important milestones past, present and future.
Men typically listed future events like "I will retire" followed by "...and then I will finally buy that boat I have always wanted!" Women typically listed future events that were all endings with no new beginnings: One by one, everyone they loved would leave them, either by growing up and moving away or dying if they were older.
That latter pattern of timeline -- where the future was percieved of as filled with nothing but endings and those endings were about other people, not personal choices like when to retire -- was strongly associated with depression.
With reading that, I immediately decided to begin making plans for a future for myself.
I decided I was not going to become some empty-nester mom feeling abandoned by my children. I was going to be a mom excitedly looking forward to things I could finally do now that the kids no longer took all my time.
I think I fairly promptly enrolled in college and took a class or two and began making plans for an education and a career and a future of my own as a person in my own right and not just as someone's wife or someone's mom.
It's possible I'm just misremembering the author and it was someone else's work, not that of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. Either way, his work was important and influential. May he rest in peace.