Dave Evans

I'm making soup for dinner.

I'm chopping an onion.

Not that hard.

I'm a little bored doing it.

But hey...

I can still be fully present to that task.

So what I can do is I can choose not to let boredom come in.

I can really enjoy the sharpness of the knife.

I can feel the crispness of the onion pushing back.

I can allow myself by choice to fully engage that experience for five or 10 minutes.

And I can drop into flow by choice.

I can make it more available.

And anytime I'm in flow, I'm in the present moment.

And that's a good place to be.

Yes, as it turns out, transactional thinking and the transactional world that we spend a lot of our time in almost invariably is future-oriented about the outcome that is yet to be realized.

And so one of the reasons flow is an antidote to transactionality is I have to be – as soon as I start thinking about the other thing, I fall out of flow.

Yes, so when we talk about this reframing of there's really two worlds out there.

In fact, we actually know from neurological research, especially the research done by Lisa Miller at Columbia, that these two halves of your brain are fundamentally wired differently.

There's what she calls the achieving brain, and there's the awakened brain, and they're quite different.

The achieving brain is always working in a system, has always got a closed-end outcome, and it's going for those results.