Creative flow is a little hard to describe but I think we've all experienced when we get totally absorbed in what we are creating, and everything happens without us quite knowing how. This page gives some examples of its part in my life...

Music

I learned the piano as a youngster but never got very good at it - I just didn't seem to have the motor skills and despite lots of practice, I always made many mistakes and was useless when performing. I gave up music lessons shortly after scraping through grade 5 piano, but I did not give up the piano. In fact, the piano became my outlet in a fairly lonely and unhappy life at boarding school. I spent many hours improvising and playing songs by ear, and in time got quite good at it. Then, after finding my faith, I began to play for worship in church and discovered what it meant to enter a state of flow jointly with other people. Over time I developed the ability to create this flow in different contexts, with choirs, bands and soloists. I'd like to give some examples.

Mathern Men's Choir - I have played for them for well over 15 years. Here is one of our particularly good performances in its entirity. What makes a performance good? It's when something happens that rarely happens in rehearsal, when everyone somehow join together to create a gentle, beautiful sound.

I have accompanied various soloists over the years, but my favourite is Craig Downes, who has the most amazing stage presence! One year, he arranged to record a Christmas album with me. It was quite an experience having to get everything perfect with very little preparation!

I played with local rock band Borderlines 2021-24, though found it hard to carve a role for the keyboard in it. But there were some great flow moments together. This was one of my favourite evenings with the band, at the Narth, Christmas 2023. I filmed with my left hand whilst my right hand just kept going!

I collaborate and perform with guitarist and saxophonist Richard Harrison, who founded Borderlines. We have had many flow moments together, but one that stands out is the very first time we tried improvising together. We had booked out our local priory church with its fantastic acoustics and grand piano, and performed for a Belgian family who had popped in just before starting Offa's Dyke. Fortunately, I had left a recorder running, and fortunately it didn't run out of battery until a few minutes later! I actually apologised to the Belgians after finishing it, thinking we hadn't done anything at all worth listening to. But as I listened back, I realized we'd produced something quite special. Here it is set to a beautiful set of shots from YouTube's Amazing World channel.

Daily Writing

First thing every morning for the last 15 years I have sat down with a cup of (redbush) tea and written a reflection on a (mostly) random passage from the Bible. Of all the experiences of flow on this page, this is the most powerful. I approach each passage in a very open way, I keep an open mind and just see where it goes, but I always respect the integrity of the biblical writer. Most of the time I find the direction the writing takes is a little unexpected. This staple part of my daily rhythm has kept me grounded through all the pressures of life, and I would recommend that everyone under stress takes time out first thing to do something like this.

Some years back, I put together a short complilation of some of my more interesting reflections. But at the end of 2024 I bought a ReMarkable tablet so I can capture them as written, but also order them book by book. If you have any comments to make on any of them, then please get in touch at roger.tucker @ outsideecho.com, but please bear in mind they are not intended as explanations, but rather explorations.

Art

I studied Art at Bourneville College of Art and Crafts in the 1970s, and came away with a very measured approach to art. I was inspired by David Hockney's pool paintings (just google them if you're not familiar), and over the year after I left worked on a large water painting of my own:

With the busyness of life I sadly never found time to embark on such a large painting project again. But later on, I found my flow again when I started to sketch when on holiday. The fascination with sketching was the looking, not the drawing itself. When you are drawing you look so intently at everything, and its in the looking you get totally absorbed:

I particularly enjoy drawing people, it's always such a challenge to capture the essence of what they are doing when in fact they are constantly moving! This was drawn from the mezanine of a cafe in Aalborg, Denmark, on a wet September afternoon...

I draw with a pen because I don't want to spend time getting everything dead right. If I was a proper artist I would go back to the studio and paint it properly!

Around the time I started sketching, my wife Grace and I attended a life class for two terms. At first I found it very hard, you have such a very limited time to produce your drawing, and the human body is not easy! But in the end I did find my flow with pastels, and I remember how amazing it was that the whole picture would come together in the final 10 minutes of the session: