My past months have been wrought with discovery, process, and reflection.

I’ve found frameworks that help me understand my needs in ways I could never quite get before:

• I need stability and routine; but it gets boring, quick.

• I need to move, create, and make; but with purpose & practicality.

• I need spontaneity; but, I need to plan before & recharge after.

Getting shit done, coordinating, organising, managing—I've learned to manage the torrents of self, but I've only ever applied those skills at work.

Lessons in pursuit of flow

Flow's one of those moments when time slips away, engrossed in the thing you're working on. It’s important to name what creates environment for flow. Practically, it’s the difference between the Maker’s vs. Manager’s rhythm.

Throughout my extended job search, I’ve had to focus on understanding my rhythms to find flow: daily, weekly, monthly.

• Put things on paper. It's one of those life lessons that continues to show itself.

• Routines over habits. Routine is a purposeful, repeated period of action. Habits are doing things with little conscious effort. The Purpose helps me.

• Transitions as ritual. I can't just "start" something at a specific hour. I enter and exit specific focus blocks with planned transition times & activities, from one stage of the day to another.

• Deadlines and accountability. Accountability is nothing without milestones, boundaries, and due dates.

• Work around others. Being alone in the home office—which is great and one of my first “offices” I’ve ever had—also creates energy & focus management difficulties.

Kindness flows towards imperfection

One project in Design School was to create something using a natural element, the one you felt closest with. I've always felt a closeness to water.

In the end, I made a complicated water slide system lashing sticks I’d gathered to th slides using hemp cord. Pulling different strings would allow the water to flow through the slides in different ways, ending up in a container: me.

It was supposed to represent my process and how I learn. Flowing to and fro.

Sometimes the water leaks & falls out. Other times, it makes it all the way to its final destination, whether I led it that way or not.

Water flows. Water moves in many ways—through; in; around; under, etc.

Moe directly applicable, water:

• adapts to it's surroundings;

• takes shape of it's container;

• changes state depending on environment;

• can be just as destructive as it can joyful.

Pursuing flow and imperfection is ultimately a pursuit of a life-long practice in self kindness.

I've learned my preferred flows through the day, and when things come up, I have other transitions in the day to come back into flow.