Flow

Flow - even the onomatopoetic way the word flows, sorry, out of your mouth. The f being the force as it explodes out of your mouth, followed by the "el"and the only vowel of the word and concluding with the cross section of a wave. 

According to that font of knowledge, Wikipedia, has 42 separate definitions or examples of the word flow. With that number, we could squeeze in a quote from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to Galaxy, where Douglas N Adams (his initials take us down another rabbit hole to Cambridge and nearly forgetting Friedrich Miescher.) Adams had written that Earth had been made to calculate the answer to Deep Thought's question on Life, the Universe and Everything. It was run by mice, wasn't it?

Okay, so what does flow mean? Funny you should ask. Well, you could say that it is the motion of particles in a liquid or a gas. I am sure that we have all done that cheeky fart under the duvet after a good meal and hoped that it would be a gas and not a liquid. Of course, the movement of those particles emitted are described by the Brownian motion. No other colour could be used, but I guess it was discovered by Mr. Brown, the Scottish botanist, but not this Mr. Brown, Paddington Bear's human keeper. Three scientists described this motion including the aforementioned Scotsman (1827 when observing pollen grains's movement in water), Albert Einstein (1905) and Jean Baptiste Perrin (and quite soon after where he measured the size of atoms).    


Flow can also be defined as a mass movement down a slope. Love that one form of mass movement down a hill is named after a song played by Radiohead. LinkedIn, remember that site, calculates the stability of a slope as: 

"The basic formula for calculating the FOS (Factor of Safety) for a slope is: FOS = (c + σ tan φ) / τ where c is the cohesion of the soil, σ is the normal stress, φ is the angle of internal friction, and τ is the shear stress. This formula assumes that the slope is homogeneous, isotropic, and has a constant slope angle. However, in reality, slopes are often complex and heterogeneous, and may have different layers, water pressures, and external forces. Therefore, more advanced methods are needed to account for these factors."

I have often tried to enter the next definition of Flow - the mental state of being fully immersed and focused in a job. Mihály Csikszentmihályi a positive psychologist, talks about the heightened focus and immersion in activities such as art, play and work. It has been suggested by Teresa Amiable, what a great name, from Harvard found that people are "more creative in flow" but they become more creative the day after a "flow state". It suggests that flow increases creativity in the moment and in the long term. 

What about when a sentence has flow, think of when you are listening to a TED talk, see further up this post, or when listening to an East or West coast rapper, they both have good flow. The naturalness of speaking at speed. Does rap and Shakespearian iambic pentameter have flow? The rhythm and the flow helped control the speed of the sonnets and plays. Even a standup comedian has to control the flow of telling a joke, what do they say about a good joke? It needs good...timing.





Hope that helps

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