SOMETHING ETERNAL ABOUT A POKER GAME

I was staring at a rotten hand at 11:30 on a Friday night, when a thought struck me. I looked over at the guy across the table drinking a beer from a bottle and I thought, there is something eternal about a poker game. I didn’t share that insight with the other guys because table talk tends to be not so philosophical. I folded my cards. The thought stuck with me.

There is something eternal about a poker game.

What does that mean? I didn’t have a clue. But it began to come together at the Orange Bowl. The place was packed. Dozens of scalpers roamed outside the stadium offering to sell tickets at jacked-up prices. Our seats were on the 30-yard line, up in the second tier, not the best of views. At least four thousand people who had snuck in were constantly parading around the aisles. In the parking lot after the game, we were immobilized by dozens of busses spewing noxious fumes.

I could have watched the game at home for free. With instant replay. And close up of the action. And commentary. And a comfortable chair, and, and, and…. Why people pay so much money for so much inconvenience?

Answer: Because it’s therapeutic.

Elias Canetti, author of Crowds and Power, suggests that “people in the stadium have tuned out the rest of the city and the rest of their lives…for the duration of the time in the arena…they have left behind their associations, rules and habits.” They have lost themselves in the crowd. They are absorbed in a competitive action that mutes their background discomforts and insecurities. Their normal statuses merge into a camaraderie in which they share a common goal and a comforting equality. Outside the stadium they have eighty thousand different points of view, but inside they merge into one identity, one goal, one purpose: root for the home team. It’s a rest from nagging burdens. An escape.

You can’t do that at home.

Uless you are playing poker.

At 11:30 on a Friday night, one is deeply absorbed; the work week with its ups and downs, frustrations, conflicts and dealing with difficult people, melt away. Football and poker offer an opportunity to edge into a therapeutic twilight zone, where the present disappears.

A few years ago, I spent two weeks at a seminar at the University of Connecticut. We were deeply involved from 8 AM until eleven PM every day. Speakers, classes, research, discussions, meals together a lot of chit chat. Total immersion. A week into the program, a fascinating article appeared in the seminar’s daily newspaper. “Isn’t it interesting how your real life tends to seem unreal?” We were so wrapped up in the program, so involved with a cadre of new people, that it felt like we had been transported into an alternate life. When asked if she missed her husband and kids, a woman at dinner looked at me as if a light had gone over her head. “Well, no…actually… I don’t. I’ve been too busy.”

*The real-world fades at a seminar.

*The negatives of our lives are temporarily lost in the unified beast at the stadium.

* There is something eternal about a poker game

What all this means is that breaks from the prosaic world are healthy. We need to get out and scream once in a while. Part escape, part respite, part fun, part relief.

We have many avenues upon which to seek respite: a thrilling novel, an amusement park, gardening, a riveting game of chess, a movie, a pick-up basketball game, solving an equation, inventing the light bulb, combat or buying a hotel on Boardwalk.

FLOW

Social scientists call this immersed state-of-mind, flow. Flow is a cognitive state where one is completely embroiled in an activity—from painting and writing to prayer and surfboarding. It involves intense focus, creative engagement, and the loss of awareness of time and self.

The process of flow was discovered and coined by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. [If you want to experience flow, take a few hours to learn to spell and pronounce his name. Then take a nap.] In the 1960s, Csikszentmihalyi studied the creative process and found that when artists were immersed in a project, they would persist at their task relentlessly, regardless of hunger or fatigue. He also found that the artist would lose interest after the project was completed, highlighting the importance of the process and not the end result.

People engaging in flow have feelings of success, pride, and accomplishment—all of which encourage more learning and development. An activity emanating from flow is usually enjoyable, sometimes ecstatic.

“Excuse me, Miss, do you have the time?” “Time? What’s time when I’m going with the flow.”

Flow is the joy of doing something for the sake of doing it. After various interviews with poets, dancers, chess players, and others, Csikszentmihalyi defined flow as: “A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.”

When young Bill Gates was coding for Microsoft, he wrote, “Unconstrained by cost or time, I’d fall into a zone of total focus.”

Musical prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart might be physically sitting at a table with other people, but his mind was pulsating with multiple instruments interacting as he composed another masterpiece in his mind. He was physically there, but mentally in a happy zone.

However, it’s not all fun and games. Too much immersion could be a symptom of dissatisfaction; seeking permanent flow without a genuine interest is an attempt to escape. Psychologists Edward Hirt and Dolf Zillman believe that fans that over identify with a team, take its losses personally. Their mood and self-esteem suffer when the team loses. “Fans are setting themselves up for a great deal of misery by committing themselves to a team.” The man who lives in front of his television during football season might be psychologically identity-fusing with a gaggle of muscle-bound millionaires running around on the field. The same could be said for too much golf, too much jogging or too much shopping.

When therapy becomes a way of life, it ceases to be therapy.

When we come home at one in the morning after six hours of poker / eternity, we are tired but energized, an idea I eventually figured out.

SUBSTACK SIDEBAR

Thomas Edison could be the poster boy for flow. Some would call him obsessive, possessed, maybe even bizarre. Sleeping and eating were annoying distractions to his work. He napped and drank milk throughout the day. He ate between four and six ounces per meal. If focused on a project at midnight, he and his team kept right on going. “He could work fifty-four hours at a stretch,” wrote his biographer, Edmund Morris. He had no time for friends; they too were a distraction.

At the end of his life, Morris wrote about reporters who “were struck by the fact that, though present, he seemed to be elsewhere.”

Flow was his constant companion.