Entering the zone

If you buy me enough drinks, I'll tell you how theoretical phsyics (which I've never done any of, really) is more like poetry writing (again, no experience) than you might think. It's not about the symbolic manipulations, the technique, it's the feeling you get as you put the pieces together. It could be like the feeling a chess master or indeed a martial arts master has when engaged in their art.

Deep in the comments of The Numerist Fallacy (an argument of the are-computers-real-art type from Grand Text Auto) you see:

“When I’m writing poetry, it feels like the center of my thinking is in a particular place, and when I’m writing code the center of my thinking feels in the same kind of place.”

Yeah! Everybody gets to this place now and again - artists, physicists, players, fighters - the ultimate creative space where the tools at hand disappear from the problem leaving only the mind to grasp the world, and change it.