The Zone

I once read about ‘the zone’ that athletes enter while playing their sport. At first it was reported by distance runners, who said that they sometimes entered a trance-like state, where they were detached from themselves, feeling neither pain, nor effort. Then, athletes in other sports spoke about being in a similar zen-like state. I related to this from my younger days as a cross country runner, and as a passionate, schoolyard basketball player. If I was playing b-ball with a tight group of team mates, and we were reading each others’ moves, passing the ball to the open man, and seamlessly switching from offense to defense, it felt as if my body and mind had surrendered themselves to the game.

Then, I discovered the same condition occurring during my creative process. First, in my painting class at university, I’d sometimes find myself totally lost inside of my painting, intuitively creating colors, shapes, and spatial relationships. Then, as an art director, working with certain writers; we’d ying and yang on our assignment, and sometimes would build our solution with us finishing each others’ sentences, and not knowing nor caring who thought of what. When it happened like that, the cosmic energy that we created usually flowed right through to the agency chiefs, and on to the client presentation. It was an irresistible force. When I see that same energy jumping out of a script or storyboard, my heart starts beating faster, and my adrenaline starts to pump.

These days, I often find myself in the zone when I’m on the set. Artistic, intellectual, political, and physical problems are all meshed together all needing to be solved. Driving the crew against a time crunch, inventing visualizations, finessing performances, while ensuring that all of the collective decisions are making the commercial as good as it can be, requires using every part of my being. When it’s going right, and all of the players are meshing, it puts me in the zone. For me, it’s as good a time as I can have, without taking my clothes off.