Heroes Not Zombies

I love the concept, and the phenomenon, of flow.

Look at these grasses below the water. You can easily tell that the water is flowing strongly and making them all point in the same direction. You can even see the water. But you can’t see the flow.

It’s like when I’m in the garden. It can be a cloudless, blue sky day, or a grey, cloudy day, but at around 4pm I will feel the wind start to blow on my face. I’ll hear it rush through the trees, shaking their branches and rattling their leaves. But I can’t see it. I can’t see the wind. Just the effects of the wind.

Flow is like that. It’s an invisible force made visible by the way it shapes the world.

Look at this river. You can tell that it, too, is flowing fast, can’t you? There aren’t any rocks sticking up for the water to foam against but you could swear you can see the currents. Beneath, through, within, the water, is the flow.

We are like that too. We human beings. Life flows through us, shaping us, bending us, pushing us on, encouraging us, driving us onwards. Life flows through us making us grow, mature and develop.

It doesn’t help to resist that flow. Well, that’s not completely true, is it, because there is something in response, in reaction, which is a kind of resisting, a kind of pushing back on, leaning into, or standing against, which shapes us.

Flow doesn’t have a starting point.

Flow doesn’t end.

Flow is.

Many years ago, as I walked to the train station one day on my way to work, I came across an excellent example of how to respond to flow –

Surf it!