All quiet on the editor’s blog lately — I’ve been on holiday for two weeks in Southern Italy. I was so totally signed off my editorial responsibilities I couldn’t have written anything more complicated than a shopping list, I swear.

This hasn’t always been true of my level of happiness while on holiday. What was the difference? The villa, which we shared with two other families, had a tennis court and except during the hottest part of the day, we kept up a continual round of doubles.

Now I am no Venus Williams, but I do like playing tennis. I just don’t do it very much. But when you can play daily, very often against the same opponents, it gets truly interesting. I suspect the key to my happiness was not the sunshine and free time, but my time in ‘flow’. 

Psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi (former head of psychology at the University of Chicago) has for the past few decades been developing the theory that people are most happy when they are in a state of flow, or as a sportsperson (or my doubles partner husband) might say ‘in the zone’.

Hungarian-born Csíkszentmihályi has described flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Apparently it’s important that a balance be struck between the difficulty of the task and the skill of the performer. For example, if skill and challenge are too low, then apathy is the result.

In the past, I was all too ready to throw in the sweaty towel — through a mix of inability to play well enough and lacking the killer competitive instinct. But this summer my skill and the task lined up perfectly and I flowed. I have to say: that felt good. But then, so did the afternoon siestas and hours of novel-reading…