Part of this summer’s Discardia project was to re-evaluate the things I do for fun — like bookbinding. Another part was to catch up on all the business reading I’ve been meaning to get through, and I finished several books that I’d had queued up for months (or longer). One of those was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (here’s the short version in Csikszentmihalyi’s TED talk).

I haven’t been doing as much bookbinding in the last couple of years. Part of the reason is that changing roles last year cut down a bit on my free time, as I tried to wrap my head around my new areas of responsibility. Part of the reason, I think, is that I have hit this awkward stage in my binding in which my skills have leveled up to the challenges of the bindings I usually do. I’m still pleased the final product but some of the creation parts aren’t as enjoyable as they used to be; they’re not triggering what Csikszentmihalyi calls the “flow” state the way they used to do.

Work was fairly stressful this summer, and on a couple of weekends when I had energy I did all the prep work for the Coptics above, making all the covers and punching holes in the sections. Then when I got home in the evenings and my head was still too wrapped around work for me to focus, I could stitch together a book or two. There’s still something satisfying about doing the stitching, trying to get the tension exactly perfect and watching the book finally come together, that helps calm my wild mind on nights like that.