The opposite of flow

In this episode, we explore what happens (or not) when things get too stuck to move…

With the end-of-year holiday period over, it’s now that merry season of all these shiny New Year’s Resolutions quietly falling apart, evaporating silently into the nothingness of wishful thinking and lost causes. In my case, though, there’s one resolution that I need to start right now, to get things moving again, and counter a natural tendency I’d best describe as the opposite of flow.

All my own fault, of course. Sure, I’m good starting new things - way too good at it, in fact - but, uh, not so good at finishing them. The result is that everywhere around me is the detritus of yet another not-quite-completed task piled up on top of the paperwork and more of all the other not-quite-completed tasks, each left there seemingly forever to clutter up my mind and life. With the exception of the work-benches in the kitchen - which somehow I do still manage to keep clear and clean - just about every other surface in the entire house has its own sedimentary filing-system of papers and clutter and more, all unindexed, impenetrable, unusable. Not A Good Idea…

I do at least know how it happens, though it doesn’t make it any easier to resolve. Most often it’s the classic ‘Hole In My Bucket’ syndrome, where to get the task completed suddenly demands that another task must be completed first, which in turn suddenly calls for yet another unexpected task, and so on seemningly ad infinitum. Hence, for instance, this rather large-scale new example from earlier this week:

That’s the entire content of a bookcase in my office. But what’s it doing there? And why is it still there, when it’s obviously not the right place at all? Well, this is what tends to happen with almost everything here these days…

It had seemed at first just a straightforward task. Some years ago, when I was packing up to move overseas for a while, I’d lent a set of good-quality bookcases to a friend. In turn she’d passed them on to her son to set up his new place when he first left home. All fair enough: but it meant that when I came back from abroad, it meant that I was missing a few bookcases, and all I could buy as replacements in those COVID-lockdown days were those crappy white ones with shelves that sag and with back-panels so bad that if anything falls off a shelf it vanishes behind the bookcase itself and is pretty much lost forever. Tedious, but survivable. Sort-of.

Eventually, though, her son didn’t need those bookcases any more, and sent them back to me. Meaning that I could get rid of the crappy ones at last, and replace them with bookcases that looked good and that I could actually trust not to fall apart on me. Yay!

So all I needed to do was a straightforward swap. I’d emptied the bookshelves onto whatever spare surface I could find, such as the old sofa in the mostly-unused living-room that you can see in that photo above. My friend helped me swap out the crappy bookcases, clean up and recover everything that had fallen out of the back of them - oh wow, is that where that long-lost small hammer had gone? - and put the good bookcases up in their stead. The last part of the task would have been to put each of the books back in their designated place - but there, of course, was where the whole process came to a grinding halt…

The two sets of bookcases were the same height, same width, same depth. Yet their bookshelves were a different thickness: in fact one of the reasons why the crappy bookcases were so crappy was that their shelves were too thin - about a quarter-inch thinner than those on the good ones. But that small-seeming difference meant that several books on each shelf wouldn’t fit any more, which meant that all the tightly-sorted curation of those shelves wouldn’t work any more. Although, yes, the shelves could be moved up and down a bit, but at fairly wide spacings, which merely meant that the problem would be moved to another shelf where its books also now wouldn’t fit. In practice I’d end up losing an entire shelf just to make the more important sets still fit together - which also meant that I’d have to rework the entire structure of how I’d organised the books on those bookcases, just to make anything work work at all. Oh, and I’d also have to find somewhere else to put that shelf’s-worth of books, when there wasn’t any ‘somewhere else’ to put them. And I just don’t have the time and energy to do any of that right now - which is why the whole lot of them are still languishing on the sofa, and unlikely to move from there any time soon.

So yeah, the opposite of flow…

And these days, it often seems just about every task will somehow end up getting stuck in that way. Oh well.

---

Sure, it’s not just me: I do know that. Yet everywhere I look, out there in the wider world, I see system after system getting stuck and stranded in that exact same way. Everything depends on everything else: and as soon as there’s just one bit missing in any of those long, long sequences of ‘There’s A Hole In My Bucket’ tasks, then yeah, everything comes to the same grinding halt. Again.

The possession-economy and its bewretched money-system provide some of the most common causes for that. On the one side our world is riddled with supposed ‘adults’ that behave like two-year-olds in a possessive temper-tantrum, screaming a metaphoric “mine! mine! MIIINE!!!” at everything they see, all but preventing any kind of flow at all; and on the other, we have that mess around money, which supposedly makes the world go round, yet in practice mostly makes it go stop. Isn’t currency is supposed to be about creating a current of economic flow? - but in reality that’s about the one thing that it doesn’t do. So many worthwhile projects stalled and starved for lack of funds and the like; it’s only the worthless ones to ‘make' money’ for worthless parasites that get funded instead. And in more visible and more easily-experienced everyday form, the gates at every station that block the flow of passengers to and from the trains, just to satisfy the relentless demands of the money-god; the same at the supermarket, where it takes just ten minutes to gather what we need, yet wait twice as long to plod our way through the checkout process.

In short, the opposite of flow: everything would flow a whole lot faster if we got rid of that misery-inducing money-mess.

---

It’s like what can happen to a river to a river if it’s starved of flow: all those small particles of sand and dust and silt end up clumping together, layer upon layer, until nothing can flow at all. And then everything dies…

So how do we counter the opposite of flow, so as to get everything moving again? Right now, I honestly don’t know. Do you?

---