It's fitting that we turn to poets, as well as clinicians and scientists, to understand what makes life, our sickness and health the way they are. We depend on writers, artists, composers to touch us with beauty, joy, sadness - the whole spectrum of what can make our sojourn on earth so richly rewarding, even exhilarating, as well as distressing, even tragic.

Studies tell us that indeed these people are not the extroverts who thrive on the company of family and friends. And, the research adds, they die earlier: poets live an average of 62.2 years, nonfiction writers 67.9 years, playwrights 63.4 years, and novelists 66 years. But they are not to be pitied for their shorter lives or their shyness, eccentricity, or isolation. These creative souls live in "the flow."

The University of Chicago psychologist who put the word "flow" into the vocabulary of social scientists and mainstream language discovered the phenomenon by serendipity. On the way to his campus office one day he passed a vacant warehouse where artists were busy painting. They were completely absorbed in what they were doing. Dr.Mihaly Csiksentmihaly, the psychologist, found out they were largely unemployed and no one was commissioning them to paint what they were creating.

So why did they continue, day after day? In asking them to describe what it was like to be so engrossed in a job that had no promise of monetary reward, he was introduced to the word "flow." Artist after artist said that they lost themselves in their activity so completely that they experienced a "flow."

Flow is defined as "the quality of experience" that individuals feel when involved in something that connects them to something bigger than the ego self, something so captivating they lose all sense of time, space and even pain.

Csiksentmihaly then started studies of people in a wide range of occupations and avocations who sooner or later would use the word flow to describe the feeling of being lifted out of themselves by what they were doing.

Psychobiologically, the research has now shown that flow sends through our systems streams of dopamine - a neurotransmitter of pleasure, of rewarding expectation and motivation. Endogenous opioids - the body's own pain killers - also increase.

When we did studies of women with breast cancer two years after they had completed surgery and chemotherapy, we found that those who reported the most well-being, despite recurrence or pain, were the ones who had found flow for themselves. Some had become gardeners, some had taken up writing poetry, some painted, some said they learned just to be instead of always doing - being with family, pets, music, nature.

Whatever it was, they had found something so absorbing that they forgot themselves and their pain. They practiced "Fordyce's Law", as stated in the science of pain literature. In plain English, it says: "We suffer less when we find something better to do."

So this is a month celebrating weddings, graduations, friendship and family. Of course, many extroverts also experience flow. Indeed, the feeling of warmth from being among those we love - talking and joining together at happy times of commencing or commemorating a new stage of life - can be powerful in its healing potential.

But meanwhile the loners who are the poets, painters, writers and authors - as well as the proverbial absent-minded professors - have their own music. It may not save them from sickness or early death, but their present tense - their time in the flow - makes their lives very wide and very deep.

Then they leave behind their own legacy of reward for every one of us - introverts, extroverts and all in between - to enjoy and learn from for many years that follow.

UPDATED: 7-01-2004

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