On a recent Friday morning, I weighed the options: work from home or go to the office. I chose to skip a shower, change clothes after a run, and dive into the workday from my home office.
Mid-morning, as a crew trenched fiber for T-Mobile out front, my wife yelled, “Come here quickly!” They’d ruptured the water line. A river was heading for our front door. Suddenly, everyone was scrambling to dam the flow and shut off the main.
Which got me thinking about the other kind of flow.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at Claremont Graduate University spent decades studying what happens when humans are fully absorbed in what they’re doing. He is credited with the concept of “flow”—that rare state where the work stops feeling like work. Athletes call it the zone. Whatever the label, it’s genuinely rare, stubbornly elusive, and almost never arrives on schedule.
Here’s the counterintuitive part: you can’t force it. The harder you chase it, the faster it runs. The people who find it most reliably tend to be the ones who’ve learned to back into it—going for a long run, taking a walk outside, or listening to music for a moment that clears the mental cache.
Back to my “take me to the river” Friday. Amazingly, the city repair crew had the water back on by evening, and in that scramble, I finally got my shower … and this post. Most disruptions don’t resolve that cleanly—but they do resolve.
As your Wi-Fi flows to enable reading this, remember: somebody out there dug that line.