The Flow
Everything flows. How the old philosophers learned from water, and how we can too.
Everything movesThe river that is never the same
The Greek thinker Heraclitus taught that everything flows. As Plato reports him, you cannot step twice into the same river: new water is always arriving, and you are changing too.
In the Chinese Tao Te Ching water is the teacher: nothing is softer, yet nothing is better at wearing down what is hard. Constant movement overcomes any obstacle.
From AthensThe Stoics: flow with what you cannot change
Around 300 BC, Zeno of Citium taught in a painted porch in the Agora of Athens, the Stoa Poikile. From that porch the school took its name: the Stoics.
- Separate what is in your power from what is not.
- Put your whole strength into the first, and meet the second with calm.
- Live in agreement with nature: a slave, Epictetus, and an emperor, Marcus Aurelius, both lived by this.
One wholeNature, the divine and the Hermetic way
Pantheism is the view that the divine and nature are one and the same; the philosopher Spinoza wrote of "God, or Nature". The Hermetic writings, Greek texts from Roman Egypt, teach that the universe is one living whole. Translated into Latin in 15th-century Florence, they helped light the Renaissance.
Science studies the same flow with numbers. Fluid mechanics describes how water, air and blood move, and the same equations shape rivers, weather and wings.
Go deeperSources
Everything on this page was written for you here. These are the places we drew from, if you want to walk further on your own: