Flow. Flow. Being in a flow state. It’s fascinating how such a beautiful term – meaning completely losing yourself while doing something creative – is becoming so widely and instinctively understood as part of language. I don’t find it that surprising, though, because during the pandemic, creativity came to the rescue.

Doing and making things for the pure pleasure of it, finding the thrill of putting something together, constructing something tangible with almost nothing except your own thoughts and the materials you have to hand: all these things have been lifesavers that surged through millions of locked-in homes in the past two years.

The examples are obvious, innumerable, both intensely personal and universal. Knitting. Sewing. Embroidering. Singing. Dancing. Mending. Re-making. Self-styling. Performing. Journaling. Redoing your place with nothing but what you already have. All of these, and many more things which people have discovered they can do and make, alone within four walls, have been adding up to a society-wide phenomenon of our times. It’s creativity as a healer. A transformational escape into mental freedom.

All of this is a humanising, levelling and uplifting delight to watch, too: an empathy generator in a time when the dark forces of the internet would rather have us at each other’s throats. And that’s radical in all sorts of ways. In ways that conservative powers – both big and little C – are dead set against.

Because here’s the thing: devoting time to doing something with your hands, mind, body; then practicing, getting better at it and ending up having produced an actual thing, no matter how small, is the ultimate weapon against the unstoppable ‘attention economy’. You can’t make things while browsing the internet. Being creative forces you to put down your phone. It frees our hands and our minds. It silences internal worries. It blocks out the continual invasion of bad news upon bad news.

The primary joy of experiencing flow is the sheer anxiety and time-stopping escape of it. It’s a state of unselfconscious consciousness that can happen for minutes or even hours at a time. It gives access to an inner power that nobody ever led us to believe we could possibly feel and opens pathways to skills we never imagined we’d acquire. Look at Tom Daley, publicly knitting up a storm while he transformed all his dive-waiting time into amazing sweaters in the Tokyo Aquatics Centre last summer. He said something astonishingly important about this: that it calmed him down to have something to concentrate on. But this wasn’t only creativity as distraction therapy. It turned out Daley was working up a proper skill with an actual fashion talent wrapped around it.

He started sharing patterns on Instagram, then signed up to his own kit designs, called Made With Love, replete with high-fashion cricket jumpers and cable-knit cardigans, a collaboration with LoveCrafts.com.

That an Olympic gold medallist should delight in becoming a virtuoso inspirational knitter, while being happily married, to Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, and being a new father: could it possibly have been conceived of to see any athlete displaying all that burgeoning, colourful, technical creativity in any year other than 2021? This is a society in which people – especially men and particularly athletes – are assumed to be so single-minded, honed and narrowed by focusing on success that they have nothing else in their lives. Daley has unravelled and re-fashioned all those stereotypes. Since the beginning of the pandemic, a million people have taken up knitting; bringing the total of British knitters, male and female, to around 7 million. “It’s become a winter sport,” remarked Edward Griffith, the CEO of LoveCrafts.com, who should know.

I looked up where the concept of flow came from. One answer is that it was coined by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience came out in 1990. Born into a family which had suffered traumatically in World War II, he dedicated himself to becoming a ‘happiness researcher’. In his book, he defined flow as an immersive state “in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” He found that this experience was reported across all classes, genders, ages and cultures.

It seems to me that this definition fits perfectly with what’s happening now: the en masse reaching for creativity as a way of coping with the historic collective trauma of the pandemic. The effectiveness of creativity as a form of therapy has more substance to it than some woo-woo theory. In 2004, a neurologist called Arne Dietrich found that being in the flow state temporarily inactivates the prefrontal lobe. The study hypothesised that this allows more areas of the brain to communicate freely. In other words, flow dials down self-consciousness and shuts up the inner critic. When it really takes off, it’s a form of cleverness, link-making and imagining new things into existence, a free-floating of strait-jacketed logic and social norms.

It can’t be a coincidence that the term flow is used in hip hop, too: it describes the euphoric skill of rhyming language and meaning with music – the art of words falling on the beat. It didn’t need scientists to tell rap artists or their audiences that flow is perfect way to capture that sensation. George the Poet once used it when he was talking about listening to his hero, Nas: “His music was sophisticated. It was advanced. It’s poetry. It flows like water.”

No doubt about it: flow is a rising word of the times. Understood and passed around as an expressive part of vernacular speech (even if it’s become semi-detached from its double insider-expert sources in psychology and rap music), its usage also points to another super-important reality. There are no hierarchies in flow states. No discrimination or segmentation between high art, craft, design, musical genres, amateur and professional, between generations or incomes. When you’re in it, you are. Just are.

It’s a relation of mindfulness, I suppose, but there’s one big difference. When you come out of it, you don’t just feel a little bit better about the day: you also come out with something you’ve made, written, played, spoken, recorded, achieved. What starts inside begins to generate self-actualisation, a fact that Csikszentmihalyi rated as a human right. It gradually builds self-confidence and a realisation of the specialness of someone’s identity. That’s valuable in itself – and it’s free. But sometimes, that inward, introverted, private and mysterious process, perhaps taking years, bursts outwards. Suddenly, what that solitary creative person was doing becomes something that loads of people recognise on sight. It captures exactly how everyone feels about living in the world. That’s when creativity becomes what we call art. It flows into the collective culture, and changes it.

Creativity in fashion is embodied by the ambidextrous thinking that designers do when they bring together two or three (or more) ideas in configurations that no-one’s quite thought of before. It doesn’t in any way follow that the function of this creativity is to make everyone feel happy and comfortable, though. Its impacts can’t necessarily be pinned to a mood board. Witnessing that is what I’m in it for: the moment of immersion in a feeling when somebody’s saying something that’s extremely personal, but also big-picture significant. Creativity in fashion can swing towards escapism and extravaganza, which is all sensational and lovely, don’t get me wrong. But it can also satirise and shame, confront establishment and mainstream audiences with stuff they don’t know or won’t look at; use its intelligence to force a system to reform, change and open up.

That’s how today’s creativity, especially among young people, is being strongly channelled towards healing in a much wider, more profound and collective sense: they’re demonstrating and practicing ways to redesign society. Where bigger companies, corporations and conglomerates are signing up to big sustainability and diversity pledges and targets (grand-sounding but mostly impossible to follow as a consumer), young designers and entrepreneurial startups are actually doing the work of inventing, innovating and putting forth completely new blueprints of how society should operate.

And that’s what makes the radical, counter-cultural, unpredictable and uncontrollable qualities of creativity so threatening to the forces of right-wing and dictatorial powers. So dangerous that they’re doing everything they can to stamp out the liberating human potential of it. Don’t trust me on this. Just google the history (and witness the current) of what Conservative governments in the UK have done to defund and dismantle arts education: a sustained campaign to eliminate creative thinking and expression from primary schools, right through to universities.

The latest plank of that campaign is cutting university subsidies for full-time students on an art and design courses by an extraordinary 50 percent in 2022. Look further and the shocking part is the amount that was being spent was already paltry: £36 million. They probably spend more in Whitehall on Post-It Notes. Slashing this to £19 million hits provision and resources for teaching students on art, design, fashion music, drama, dance, media studies and journalism degrees. Who started this? Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings.

Gove was Conservative education minister from 2010 to 2014. That was the first time Cummings got his foot in the door of Downing Street, as a ‘special advisor’ to the education minister. Cummings’ agenda was always clear.

Gove, with Cummings behind him, worked out a way of damaging art in schools. They imposed a system whereby schools are ranked higher for the number of pupils taking GCSEs in English, maths, science, a language and one of the humanities. This meant state schools have gradually stopped offering art, design, textiles, dance, photography and music courses, because they can’t be valued for it or have it funded properly. Also, arts subjects were downgraded points-wise for students applying to universities.

Boris Johnson loved this. When he was Mayor of London, he was cheering on “my old chum Gove and his brilliant new Gove-levels”. In the last election, he ran on a Brexit manifesto which had a £270 million ‘arts premium’ education policy promise hidden somewhere in it. That, however, was reneged on in the last budget, using Covid as an excuse to abandon it. All children now must study STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) regardless of their aptitude. Regardless of their creative intelligence. Regardless of how all those sides of education urgently need to join together to create a better future.

Very often, the argument for the worth of the UK creative industries – and for the continuance of the unique British art school system which feeds and underpins them – is made on the grounds of all the money they make for the country (and the taxman). That’s true: pre-pandemic, the creative industries (fashion included) were growing faster than any other part of the economy. In fact, DCMS (the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) found that culture brought in twice as much money to the economy as sport in 2019, and more than gambling and agriculture combined. Yet still the arts are disregarded. The actual truth is that the value of creativity cannot be counted in money. It’s much higher and more precious than that, because of the way it contributes to culture, to connecting people, to joy, to self-esteem and good mental health.

Most of all, it’s freedom of thought, the freedom to manifest feeling as you will. It’s terrifying to see how the forces of authoritarian politics are bent on closing down the voices and thoughts of creative people. On the other hand, well, it doesn’t look as if they will succeed: not in a time when the concept of flow – undefined but completely understood – is simultaneously suffusing the language. That’s a hope.

Taken from Issue 15 of 10 Magazine – FUTURE, BALANCE, HEALING – out NOW.

@sarahmower_