getting “in the zone” by staying open

“Open” is how I feel when I am “in the zone” which is a phrase used a lot by jazz artists who improvise. Both terms are used by practitioners of meditation and free diving as well and it turns out they are talking about the same thing. When free diving the experience is closer to removing inhibition as you lose your fear of being submerged underwater when you are an air breathing mammal doing an activity that is directly defying death, and blatantly going against your innate nature of self preservation. As soon as the fear is gone, you can free dive to your max potential. I remember taking college classes in jazz improvisation (4 semesters worth) and in class, people did some of their worst improvising since they were under pressure, being graded, being watched by their fellow students and their professor during a morning class to make it that much worse. The very same people on the band stand at a live gig at 3AM after some drinks and dancing on their breaks could improvise like Coltrane. This is because they were blocked by their fear, stress and racing thoughts rather than letting go. What do all these disparate things have in common you ask? All of them and several more activities have been measured by EEG to create alpha waves in the brain. This neurological state is what artists of all stripes would call “in the zone” and it requires that you are “open” and that your racing rational thoughts are turned off. Another name for this state of mind is a “flow state” of consciousness.

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minimalism

The term minimalism is commonly misunderstood, and often maligned. In its truest sense, minimalism was an art movement, a form of architecture, and then finally a form of music, specifically Classical or art music. Recently this label has also been applied to electronica as well, and many questions seem to arise from the use of this term, which probably needs some clarification.

The best way to think of minimalism in the broadest sense, is as a series of concepts or ideas. Ideas drive many things, and in creative endeavors, ideas become design principles, guides or even sometimes arbitrary rule sets used to steer the process. The Mies Van Der Rohe quote “less is more” gets thrown around, and did stem from the Bauhaus architecture and design movement so it is legitimately part of the true definition of minimalism, but it is possibly not clear enough to those who do not intuitively understand it at face value. Another way to say this is “doing the more with less”, as in create the most function from the least amount of form. I like to use the term “Occam’s Razor” which fundamentally means “economy of means” or what we could all just call plain simple.

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