Having hobbies is essential to a happy life. Everybody needs to have the thing they do that is their niche. I found my niche. I absolutely love doing mountain biking and photography, sometimes combining the two. If you don’t have a hobby you enjoy doing, find one. Find one as quickly as possible, and watch the positive effects ensue. 

As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explained, you experience flow when doing an activity you lose yourself in. Activities you could spend hours doing and make you very ecstatic when doing so. I experience flow when doing both photography and mountain biking. While biking in the hills and fields, I have an immense feeling of flow. It’s the best activity, in my opinion, to do. That is, until you zone out too much and crash. It’s well worth a few crashes, though. You get that feeling of cool wind soaring past your face, dirt getting kicked up from the treads in your tire and thumping against your leg. You get to explore places you can’t see from the road and places that would take an hour-long hike to get to, whereas it took twenty minutes on a bike. All of this blends together to create flow, my flow.

As I mentioned, the other activity I experience flow in is doing nature photography. Sometimes, I will sit at a spot for an hour trying to get the perfect picture that I know is there. Sometimes, you just have to look at it from a different angle. It helps to have support from your family too, and having them allow me to walk somewhere either by myself and stay in one spot for a bit, or have them walk with me somewhere and just sit at a location with me. There was a time when tent camping in the Sequoias, where I wanted to take a night hike to a nearby meadow for a picture of the stars. Pictures of the night sky and the milky way are much easier to get when away from all of the light pollution. The meadow was perfect as it was far from the road and there were no trees that got in the frame. My dad and I sat in the middle of this meadow for almost an hour in the middle of the night. That’s where I experience the most amount of flow from doing photography.

Flow is a great feeling, and although it’s hard to find something that gives you that feeling, it should be something that’s constantly desired and sought out. Not all hobbies give you a feeling of flow, but that’s where you must find a hobby that does, or alter the way you approach pre-existing hobbies in order to get a different experience out of them.