In Defense of Flow

aka how to play life on easy mode

While my California trip was lovely (thank you for asking 🌴), I did adopt an important task on my journey.

For most of the f-words we’ve covered so far, I’ve leaned heavily on my commonplace book — a collection of hundreds (and soon thousands) of notecards with ideas, quotes, and scribbles from all sorts of things I’ve stumbled across. Books, movies, conversations — you name it, there’s probably a notecard birthed from it.

The point is that it extends your brain. It makes it easier to connect far-off dots. And, frankly, it makes the writing a hell of a lot more fun because now there’s a bit of treasure-hunting involved.

But there’s this other approach people use that’s intuition-based. They just listen… to life, to what’s around them, to what’s inside them… and that’s where they get amazing material for their work.

I wanted to try this approach for this week’s post because I believe intuition and mental health are two sides of the same coin. The better things are working upstairs, the more able you are to listen in an intuitive way.

Tbh, I’m not even sure what that means quite yet. But I’m learning, and hopefully, you’ll be interested enough to learn with me when we get around to that topic.

So, where did my intuition lead?

At first, I really thought the f-word was going to be “fake” given that LA is the plastic surgery capital of the world (fun fact, it’s not — South Korea is; and actually Miami and Salt Lake City (yes, in freakin Utah) actually beat out LA too… who would’ve guessed!).

But then I got on a ferry set for the Golden Gate Bridge and the word hit me like 400lb gorilla.¹

The City and the Pier

San Francisco is a city of opposites.

The headquarters of billion-dollar tech companies share the same block as homeless encampments. One-hundred-and-fifty-year-old cable cars run up and down impossibly steep streets alongside self-driving Waymos. Foggy forests cover mountain ranges that sit minutes from sun-kissed beaches.

And yet, somehow, everything belongs.

On our second day in the city, we headed to Pier 39 to see another pair of these opposites up close.

The Blue & Gold Fleet has a collection of ships that swim from the pier to the Golden Gate Bridge and back around the side of Alcatraz. The contrast is jarring. On one hand, you have a bright-colored monument to human achievement that’s teeming with life. And on the other, you have a cold, dark rock. Spray-painted and dilapidated. Like a far-off dream that won’t quite let itself be forgotten.

But our f-word didn’t come from either of these destinations. It came from how we got there.

As you leave Pier 39 and head towards the bridge, you push into the current.

The gold line is the bridge, and the red area shows how gnarly the water's force is as you close in. Source: Tidetech Marine Data

At first, you hardly notice. The waves are mild, even for a windy day. And the breeze is refreshing. For whatever reason, the Pacific air smells more like adventure and less like fish than other oceans.

But the voyage gets rough, fast.

The closer you get to the bridge, the harder the water pushes back. And the winds that whispered 5 minutes ago are now shouting. Half your energy is trying to glimpse the bridge overhead while the other half is holding onto anything solid for dear life.

It’s wild, exhausting, and beautiful. Like nature’s version of a rock concert.

Then, almost as if by magic, the boat scoops around and everything just…stops. The wind calms down. The waves settle. People stop gripping their seats for dear life.

I poke my head over the side and the answer is clear as day.

This is what it feels like to go with the current.

Hard is Optional

Somewhere along the way, we made “easy” a bad word.

And don’t get me wrong, some hard is good. Pushing against the status quo – good hard. Getting your body in shape – good hard. Erections – good hard.

But hard doesn’t need to be our default way of life.

In that moment on the ship, it felt like the thing I had been looking for flew right up to my face and kissed me on the forehead. Life can feel like this, it whispered. Life does feel like this, when you let it.

Now, there’s a whole bunch of stuff written about flow state and the science of it and how to tap into it. The flow I’m talking about is bigger. Less sprint, more marathon.

This flow is an easy existence. A go-with-the-current kind of life.  

If that sounds like giving up or giving in, that’s because it is. But not in the way you think.

I’m writing this portion at 6:15 am on a Tuesday morning. I woke up, without an alarm, and sat down to write several hundred words before the sun rises. I love it. This is easy for me. This is my flow. And it took a lot of hard decisions for my life to get this easy.

Flow comes when you surrender to yourself. When you get honest about who you are and what you want and make decisions to back those up. Flow is an awareness about what’s happening around you, and an understanding of how you fit — or of how you don’t — and making changes accordingly.

No one conquers their way into flow. That’s like steering a boat upstream and wondering why the waters are so choppy.

Flow is something you fall into. You let it steer you. You make yourself available to be carried.

Smiles of genuine relief 😅

You’re allowed to choose easy.

Not because you’re afraid of hard. But because you understand that working with the current will carry you further than you could have ever gone on your own.

This feels both unfinished and like the right place to end. Strange how that works. But then again, flow doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you.

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Challenge #5: Letting Go to Find the Flow

1. I’ve been watching a lot of Planet of the Apes movies, so expect more monkey references in the coming weeks.