188 • FLOWAristotle wrote, “For without friends no one would choose to live,
though he had all other goods.” To enjoy such one-to-one relationships
requires the same conditions that are present in other flow activities. It
is necessary not only to have common goals and to provide reciprocal
feedback, which even interactions in taverns or at cocktail parties pro
vide, but also to find new challenges in each other’s company. These
may amount simply to learning more and more about the friend, discov
ering new facets of his or her unique individuality, and disclosing more
of one’s own individuality in the process. There are few things as enjoy
able as freely sharing one’s most secret feelings and thoughts with an
other person. Even though this sounds like a commonplace, it in fact
requires concentrated attention, openness, and sensitivity. In practice,
this degree of investment of psychic energy in a friendship is unfortu
nately rare. Few are willing to commit the energy or the time for it.
Friendships allow us to express parts of our beings that we seldom
have the opportunity to act out otherwise. One way to describe the skills
that every man and woman has is to divide them in two classes: the
instrumental and the expressive. Instrumental skills are the ones we learn
so that we can cope effectively with the environment. They are basic
survival tools, like the cunning of the hunter or the craft of the work
man, or intellectual tools, like reading and writing and the specialized
knowledge of the professional in our technological society. People who
have not learned to find flow in most of the things they undertake
generally experience instrumental tasks as extrinsic—because they do
not reflect their own choices, but are requirements imposed from the
outside. Expressive skills, on the other hand, refer to actions that at
tempt to externalize our subjective experiences. Singing a song that
reflects how we feel, translating our moods into a dance, painting a
picture that represents our feelings, telling a joke we like, and going
bowling if that is what makes us feel good are forms of expression in this
sense. When involved in an expressive activity we feel in touch with our
real self. A person who lives only by instrumental actions without expe
riencing the spontaneous flow of expressivity eventually becomes indis
tinguishable from a robot who has been programmed by aliens to mimic
human behavior.
In the course of normal life there are few opportunities to experi
ence the feeling of wholeness expressivity provides. At work one must
behave according to the expectations for one’s role, and be a competent
mechanic, a sober judge, a deferent waiter. At home one has to be a
caring mother or a respectful son. And in between, on the bus or the
subway, one has to turn an impassive face to the world. It is only with