Guess being caught in 'the flow' (pun intended) can do this.
While he gives several instances of how people can cultivate and create flow experiences for themselves.... at work, for themselves and in relationships, I'm picking one area, that on 'friendships' to give instance in example .
Here's excerpts:
"It is not surprising that in our studies of the quality of daily experience it has been demonstrated again and again that people report the most positive moods overall when they are with friends. This is not only true of teenagers, but also of young adults and even retirees who are happier when they are with friends than with anybody else.
Because a friendship usually involves common goals and common activities, it is 'naturally' enjoyable. But like any other activity, this relationship can take a variety of forms, ranging from the destructive to the highly complex.
When a friendship is primarily a way of validating one's own insecure sense of self, it will give pleasure, but it will not be enjoyable in our sense......that of fostering growth.
For instance drinking buddies; it's a congenial atmosphere, talking, teasing, arguing and everyone feels his existence validated by the reciprocal attention paid to one another's ideas or idiosyncrasies. It is rather like collective form of television watching, and although more complex, it's actions and phrases tend to be rigidly scripted and highly predictable.
Socializing of this kind mimics friendship relations, but it provides few of the benefits of the real thing.
It is in the context of intimate friendships, however, that the most intense experiences occur.
To enjoy such one-to-one relationships requires the same conditions that are present in other flow activities. It is necessary not only to have common goals and to provide reciprocal feedback, which even interactions at parties and taverns provide, but also to find new challenges in each other's company. These may amount simply to learning more and more about the friend, discovering new facets of his or her unique individuality, and disclosing more of one's own individuality in the process.
There are few things as enjoyable as freely sharing one's most secret feelings and thoughts with another person. Even though this sounds commonplace, it in fact requires concentrated attention, openness, and sensitivity. In practice, this degree of investment of psychic energy in a friendship is unfortunately rare.
Friendships allow us to express parts of our beings that we seldom have the opportunity to act out otherwise. It is in the company of friends that we can most clearly experience the freedom of the self and learn who we really are.
Friendship is not enjoyable unless we take up it's expressive challenges. If a person surrounds himself with "friends" who simply reaffirm his public persona, who never questions his dreams or desires, who never forces him to try out new ways of being, he misses out on the opportunities friendship presents. A person who lives only by instrumental actions without experiencing the spontaneous flow of expressivity, eventually becomes indistinguishable from a robot who has been programmed to mimic human behavior.
A true friend is someone we can occasionally be crazy with, someone who does not expect us to be always true to form. It is someone who shares our goals of self realization, and therefore is willing to share the risks that any increase in complexity entails.
While we'd like to believe that friendships happen naturally, and if they fail there is nothing to be done about it but feel sorry for oneself ... while this might be true in adolescence, later in life they rarely happen by chance and one must cultivate them as assiduously as one must cultivate a family or a job.
These are the kinds of ties about which Aristotle wrote, 'For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods'."
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