The word “flow” comes from an old, old root that also gave birth to flight, flit, fleet, fluster. And flood. Also, pneumonic and pulmonary, partly because “fl-” and “pl-” are closely related. “Il pleut,” French for “it’s raining,” is a manifestation of the same root.

The flow of blood through your veins: a big deal, right? The flight of imagination. A flood of ideas. And if you’re fleet-footed, off you go.

Think about it: flow makes your day, your weeks and months, your life. If the flow is somehow blocked, most everything gets affected: your day’s work, your movements and your voice, your creativity, your conversations, the dialogue with life. If the flow isn’t channeled, most everything gets affected in a different way: dispersion, distraction, and discombobulation. “Dis-” probably comes from an old, old root! Hey, I just looked it up: the root means “apart, asunder,” and it’s related to “twice,” the notion of “two ways.”

Let’s make a numbered list.

Become keenly aware of flow as a thing in itself: in rivers and oceans; in city traffic; in dance, in gestures, in rhythms; in the sun going up and down, in the clouds going left and right.
Become keenly aware of your own flow: in your routines, in your adaptation to circumstances, in your perceptions. All around you there may be beautiful things, interesting people, important happenings that you don’t see, because your perception isn’t flowing.
Become keenly aware of the changes in your flow: the way food and drink help or hinder your energies, the way your daily routines make you rise and set like the sun or not rise and set like the sun. Talk to your habits and tell them to leave you alone already!
Become keenly aware of the paradox: you make conscious decisions, decisions are made behind the back of your consciousness; you control, oh no you don’t; you should control it more, oh no, you should control rather less. Yes. (“Yes” rhymes with “less.” Lengthen the sibilants, just because it feels good: “Yessssssss, much much lessssssss! What a messssssss!”)

The summer months in the Northern hemisphere are coming to a close. It’s the flow of the calendar, the planetary samba. The days are getting shorter, by a minute every day; the nights are getting longer, by roughly the same amount. Are we the same human beings in summer and in winter? I doubt it. It’s a whole other flow.

In Paris, where I live, August is a special month, the quietest of the whole year. Many, many Parisians leave for their sacrosanct vacations. The city is less busy, less crowded, less polluted, much much lessssssss, yes! Flow and its twin sister dispersion go for walks, visit parks and museums, take photos, make drawings, practice the cello and the piano, receive inklings and insights, take siestas, clean closets, finish projects.

But! But it doesn’t happen automatically. Just an example: I’ve been reworking a project of mine, the one called “La invención de la escritura | The Invention of Writing,” a bilingual cycle of poems illustrated by my drawings.

I’m applying for some funds, there’s a deadline, I have to structure my proposal, I’m drunk with editing, I know and I don’t know what I’m doing and what I need to be doing. The other day my brain said, “Pedro, oh Pedro! I can’t take it any longer!” It took me a while to hear my brain. Then I heard it, and I said, “Brain, oh brain! Let’s put this thing aside and let’s go visit the MAC VAL Museum, shall we?” “Yes oh yessssssss, thank you so much!” We went, my brain and multiple other parts of myself; we flowed with the metro and the tram, we flowed with the museum’s building and garden, we flowed with the exhibitions, we flowed back home. And we re-engaged flowingly with the project and its deadline.