Become the Noodle

BOLD Idea: Make time for kids to be in the deep immersion of flow.

Why it Matters: The ability to learn our best, perform our best and feel our best is waiting to be released within each of us, in flow.

Head down, scratching out the answers as quickly as possible to solving for x or recounting the dates of a 200-year old war. If I could just finish a little bit more quickly…

I sat, surrounded by twenty-six other ten-year-old’s, in the classroom of a teacher I liked more than almost any other. This is not to say that Mrs. Ishiki usurped my favorite teacher, my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Wickline, but that was simply because Mrs. Ishiki hadn’t let me sit on the floor rug singing songs most of the day, while becoming the proud owner of a baby rabbit, spawned from the mama that hopped around the classroom. Mrs. Ishiki, however, was my favorite big-kid teacher for one simple reason: as soon as I finished my work, she let me go to the back of the classroom and sit undisturbed to think, to imagine, to create…to write my stories.

I’d thrust my paper into her face, satisfied with mediocrity, and beg to be allowed to just write. No other teacher had ever let me alone long enough to sink into my imagination, let alone come up with an adventure and a whole other world for my characters to inhabit. No one had cared enough to just let me be.

Become the Noodle

I can still feel the giddy excitement of anticipation, opening my notebook of mystery stories about a female detective named Mrs. Noodle…who was in fact a long spaghetti noodle, living in a noodle world. To write for me in that classroom meant tuning everything else out, the cacophony around me, to sink into nothing. I had to become the noodle, relaxed from head to toe, flexible and open to receive whatever download of sauciness showed up that day.

I disengaged to engage, and it was only from that place of complete focus that I was able to think, to imagine, and to create from nothing, in the silence of my own mind and the peace in my own heart. In that place, I was happy and productive. I was the noodle.

I think sometimes benign neglect is exactly what kids need, not all the time, but some of the time. How else are they going to find themselves, create themselves or build their own version of the life they want to live?

Flow is a Human Right

Writing Mrs. Noodle was my first experience of flow, the mental state where you lose yourself, where time passes quickly, as you perform at your best. It happened alone, as flow so often does and I couldn’t name it at that time, but I learned that getting in that zone was about letting go and completely immersing. I felt my best in this experience, the worries of life fading away. I was happy and productive and my life mattered.

Later, in high school and college, I would again become the noodle to write poetry. I learned to loosen the tight grip on my mind, body and the world around me, to let go and tap into words and feelings that were beyond my waking mind. From there, I could express myself deeply and write far better prose than I could access normally. It made sense of my world and righted my topsy-turvy emotions.

Flow often happens in solo pursuits, but we can also access flow in groups, whether it be a deep conversation with a friend or footwork artistry and knowing communication on the soccer field.  I first experienced group flow with a neighbor friend who was four years older than me. When you’re a kid, four years seems like decades, but we connected through the alternate personas of the characters Beatrice and Mabel, crafted from our own minds.

Armed with a simple tape recorder, the elderly Beatrice and Mabel would embark on sharing their lives and happenings through endless dialogue. My friend and I would record our conversations for hours, improvising what Beatrice and Mabel would say to one another as they bantered back and forth. It was seamless and hilarious (at least to us) as we rifted off one another and it was one of my favorite ways to spend a long, summer afternoon. As characterized by group flow, we became of one mind, responding without effort, anticipating what was to come and pivoting with precision to make the storyline flow.

Individual flow and group flow are bliss points offered to us as human being get out of jail cards. The ability to learn our best, perform our best and get the most complex cocktail of positive brain chemistry we know of, lies within each of us. You will find flow on the way to your best life, and you can lay the groundwork for your children to do the same.

The Business of Flow

Flow is sometimes used in the corporate world to measure productivity. Instead of clocking hours, employers want to know how much time is spent in flow, because that’s when employees are at their most productive and creative (Upbin, 2011). Researchers have found that executives have a 500% increase in productivity (McKinsey & Company, 2013) and Harvard researchers (Griffith, 2014) continued to measure heightened creativity three days after the flow state. DARPA (2017) found skill acquisition ramped up 490% and the University of Sydney showed a 430% jump in creative problem solving. An emphasis on flow is already happening and your kids can be positioned to take advantage of it.

In high adventure sports, we watch athletes do amazing feats we never thought possible, from multiple flips in the air off skateboarding mega ramps to parachuting from cliffs to ski untouched patches of snow, to solo climbs on mountain faces without any ropes, just to name a few. These are people in flow and because of the nature of their sports, they can and must drop into flow immediately and seamlessly. As you can see, one’s interests and passions can be an access point into flow, but I believe we can also create flow-rich environments that encourage our children to drop in regardless of the activity.

Opposing Agendas

Children naturally hover and dance on the edges of flow all the time because their brains are still forming. Over time, these neural connections naturally decline and so does creativity. Because of natural patterns of development, and life’s tendency to snuff out the creative spark, a child’s path into flow may be easier than an adult’s.

When I was working on my PhD., I often said that the child’s agenda was play and the adult’s agenda was work. While I still believe that’s true, I can put a finer point on it. We are all after flow and play is the easiest place to find it as a kid, alone or with others. Yet many things adults wouldn’t consider play are loved by kids, Mrs. Noodle in point. We lean into what’s enjoyable. Flow is fun, but flow isn’t frivolous.

In flow, we come alive.

People will always have things they want you to do, problems they want you to solve, attention they want you to give, all of which is in direct opposition to what you may want. Kids are no different, they just get little say over it.

Mrs. Noodle taught me to get my have-tos out of the way as efficiently as possible, so there would be more time for the get tos. Maybe this is the foundation of a work ethic or maybe it leads to figuring out how to work smarter, both of which have enormous value.

Unfortunately, if enough have-tos get in the way, we give up the get-tos. Is there something you’ve loved in the past that you don’t make time for anymore? You’re not alone. Can you picture the bored and apathetic kid slouched in their desk chair, staring out the window, not listening as a teacher drones on about something meaningless? We are conditioned from the beginning to disavow our pursuit of flow. But Mrs. Noodle taught me that if a kid asks enough adults for what’s wanted again and again, the kid just might get it.

My last school recollection was one day in graduate school in a course on school play. We all sat around a large oval table as the professor told me I was going to pretend to be an elementary school teacher for the day. In the middle of the professor lecturing, he suddenly broke into character and started to behave like a kid in school that just wanted to play. I had to react and deal with the situation in the moment as the little kid professor crawled under the table and proceeded to bang a toy car on the chair legs, rather than attend to my imaginary classroom lesson. His actions took me by surprise, but also plunged me into a place of action. Sink or swim.

I don't think I handled the challenge with any skill at all, but I was there, I was fully awake. Being fully awake and present in school is perhaps a rare thing. Think back on your own schooling. Where are the moments when you were truly there and alive? If you can find those moments, they probably hold characteristics of flow.

We Do It For Ourselves

I’ve talked with enough people about flow to realize that what we love as a kid, is often what we still love as an adult. We may forget that passion and go off in all kinds of other directions, but some of the lucky ones find their way again and end up secluding themselves in the back of the room, thinking and imagining it all into life once more. Where might you become the noodle? We find flow for ourselves, not anyone else, but finding flow is living your best life and a world full of us all living our best lives, can’t help but benefit everyone else. The story of me and the story of you becomes the story of us.

I found my Mrs. Noodle stories at my mother’s house a few years ago, stuffed away in a cupboard, inside an unlabeled box. As I held the tattered pages in my hands, it all came rushing back, the intense focus and the unstoppable urge to bring my noodle friend to life. I flipped open one of the yellow construction paper covers, bound with decades old staples, and began to read. The stories were truly awful, full of thin plots and on-the-nose characters making predictable choices. Many a ten-year-old has written a far better story, but for me, after a short wince, I smiled at their perfection, because becoming the noodle at the back of the room had charted the path I would take for the next fifty years.

Bold Action

Your child might have a few favorite activities that produce total immersion. Make time for them daily or weekly. We want those neural pathways to be deeply grooved because we want children to know what that state of consciousness feels like.