There was a moment, years ago, when the work stopped resisting.
I was working at Schiphol in the middle of the Corona period. Pressure was high, timelines were tight, and the stakes were not abstract. If I didn’t get this right, 35 people would lose their jobs in one day. Not gradually. Not with space to adjust. All at once.
For weeks, I had been turning it over. Trying to find the right structure. Every version felt incomplete — too sharp, too risky, not quite ready. The kind of work where you know it matters, but can’t find the way in.
And then, without planning it, something shifted.
I stepped away for a moment. A short walk. A cup of tea. I wrote down a few points — nothing refined, just enough to hold the direction.
And when I sat back down, the work moved.
Not slowly. Not carefully. It just continued.
Time disappeared. The structure became clear. I was no longer deciding what to do — only following what was already there. What had been heavy became obvious. What had been scattered came together.
Everything that had been stuck started to move at once.
The outcome still wasn’t easy. People still had to leave. But instead of one concentrated moment of impact, it became something that could be carried, step by step, in a way that felt considered. Human. Right, given the circumstances.
That moment stayed with me.
Not because it felt good, but because it felt different from how I had been working before. Like something had been allowed to happen that I hadn’t been allowing.
So I tried to return to it.
Not by forcing the same result, but by repeating what came before it.
Stepping away. Creating space. A cup of tea. A few points on paper. And then, beginning, before anything had the chance to become too large again.
It didn’t always work in exactly the same way. But often enough, something opened.
What I didn’t have language for then, I can now name more precisely.
Flow is not a mood. It’s not inspiration. It’s not what happens when you finally have enough focus or discipline or time.
It’s a Rhythm. One that needs specific conditions to emerge, and collapses the moment those conditions disappear.
What I had been doing, without knowing it, was merging two things that need to stay separate:
Forming and evaluating.
Creating and judging.
The moment I sat down to work, I was already asking the work to justify itself. Testing it against what it needed to become before it had even begun.
That is not how things take shape. That is how they stay stuck.
The walk, the tea, the few points on paper, those weren’t rituals for relaxation. They were structural. They closed one mode and opened another. They created the boundary between deciding and making.
And inside that boundary, the work finally had room to move.
There are moments where work feels like pushing. And there are moments where it starts to move on its own.
You don’t always control when that happens. But you can learn to notice what allows it to begin.
This month, we’re inside the Rhythm of Flow, what it is, why it disappears, and how to build the conditions that make it repeatable.
Not by working harder. By working differently
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