“Our new dog, named for the beloved poet, / Ate a book which unfortunately we had / Left unguarded. / Fortunately it was the Bhagavad Gita,” Mary Oliver wrote in a poem about her dog Percy.
If Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (September 29, 1934–October 20, 2021) wrote this poem, the book would be “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.”
It turns out, the Hungarian-American psychologist also had a dog, which got an honorable mention in his timeless classic. In the chapter titled “The Elements of Enjoyment,” he starts by describing a point at which flow experience occurs:
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Enjoyment comes at a very specific point: whenever the opportunities for action perceived by the individual are equal to his or her capabilities. Playing tennis, for instance, is not enjoyable if the two opponents are mismatched. The less skilled player will feel anxious, and the better player will feel bored. … Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.
Csikszentmihalyi goes on to say that this “golden ratio between challenges and skills does not only hold true for human activities,” and then shares heartwarming memories of his beloved four-legged companion:
Whenever I took our hunting dog, Hussar, for a walk in the open fields he liked to play a very simple game — the prototype of the most culturally widespread game of human children, escape and pursuit. He would run circles around me at top speed, with his tongue hanging out and his eyes warily watching every move I made, daring me to catch him. Occasionally, I would take a lunge, and if I was lucky I got to touch him.
Now, the interesting part is that whenever I was tired, and moved halfheartedly, Hussar would run much tighter circles, making it relatively easy for me to catch him; on the other hand, if I was in a good shape and willing to extend myself, he would enlarge the diameter of his circle. In this way, the difficulty of the game was kept constant. With an uncanny sense for the fine balancing of challenges and skills, he would make sure that the game would yield the maximum enjoyment for us both.
Complement this excerpt from “Flow” with Mary Oliver’s “Dog Songs” and then hear Billy Collins read his dog poem “Dharma.”
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