Have you ever had an idea that felt less like something you thought of, and more like something that arrived?
You know, that state where you aren’t the one making a decision? You aren’t trying to force anything or even figure it out — you just know what’s happening, and it is simply happening. You are just part of it.
To me, that is the true magic of life. When we naturally gravitate toward the right people or the right moments, it isn’t because of a tight schedule or a forced decision. We intersect in each other’s lives because we are aligned. We are in the flow.
If there is one thing I want to master in this life, it’s that flow. But what I’ve realized is that mastering it requires a shift in how I view myself and my work. It requires stepping down from the idea of being a “creator” and learning how to become a “channel.”
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Everything starts with the questions we ask. A friend of mine recently told me she often finds herself dreaming about living in Portugal, but she convinced herself that it’s impossible. It’s too hard to earn a living, too hard to build a life. And it’s true that moving countries is often very, very hard.
But, I live a bit differently. I may not fit the standard definition of a “super successful person” who never worries about anything, but inside myself, I am deeply free. And my default response to obstacles is always: “How do we make it happen?“
There are always ways. The problem isn’t the reality of the situation; it’s the question being asked.
Many of my expat friends who are planning to move to Europe because of a dream, work, or the war… ask a similar question: “Does this place feel like home to you?”
And I answer that to me, it’s the wrong question. The question I ask is: “How do I make it feel like home to me?”
Home is where I am. If I am in Ukraine, that is my home. If I travel, that is my home. If I am with my friends, that is my home — because my home is inside me. If I want a new country to feel like home, I need to participate. I need to make the environment happen through me, and make myself happen in the environment.
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Recently, I had a strange realization about all of this while interacting with AI.
It’s a silent thing happening to everyone right now — nobody talks about it, but everyone does it. You have a question, you go to the AI.
I was building a small design framework and needed to make a decision about naming conventions. I started explaining my train of thought to the AI, asking it to help me figure it out. It led me down one direction. Then, remembering some details I had left out, I opened a second chat. In that chat, it told me a completely different direction was the “right way.”
In both chats, the AI was telling me, “This is the right way.” And sitting there at my computer, I realized what I was doing: I was a human being trying to avoid taking responsibility for my own decisions. I was trying to convince a machine to decide for me.
Why? Because there was no objective “right” direction. It was simply a matter of taste. And accepting that I am the one who has to make the choice — that my taste is the deciding factor — is a heavy realization. It forced me to ask: Who am I? What is my taste? What matters to me?
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When we think about making things happen in our lives, we use strange language.
Imagine you want a beautiful rose in your garden.
If you say, “I am going to grow a rose,” you are actually wrong. You aren’t growing the rose. You don’t grab it and pull it out from the ground. The rose grows itself.
But even the rose itself can’t really just grow itself. It needs right temperatures, water, nutrients and sun — just by itself, it won’t grow either.
So, if I want something to happen in my life, the question isn’t “How do I force this to grow?” The question is: “How do I create the environment for that flower to flourish?”
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I sat by my laptop, focusing on my feelings, and I asked myself: What is the best feeling in my life that I want to repeat? The answer was the flow. When work happens easily, when art happens naturally, when conversations happen with ease.
So, applying my own logic, I asked: What is the environment for flow?
When I closed my eyes and truly felt it, I realized that being a “creator” is not the environment for flow.
When I am a creator, I inject my ego into it. This is my idea. This is my creation. This is going to happen because of me. People are going to talk about me.
The best music I played, never felt truly mine. It didn’t happen because of me or with me; I’d say it happened through me. The best decisions in my life were not pushed by me out of the “creative will” — they were always something I allowed to pass through me without friction.
Being a “channel” is different. When you are a channel, it just happens. You just allow it to happen. I want to play music, so I just allow the music to happen through me. It’s not me forcing my knowledge onto the guitar.
Whenever I try to “write a song” — I will sit for a while with a blank sheet of paper, and then I see my attention spreading into “getting inspiration” from other people’s channels on social media or wherever.
But if I just take the pen and allow myself to write anything that is about to come, eventually, many beautiful words appear on the paper, and some of them even feel like me.
And the secret of mastering the flow is not about picking what is allowed to happen. It is about getting free of the idea of what I am, and getting rid of the idea of what I am not — to allow everything to pass through my channel freely — so there is no dead water stuck under the pitfalls, and life has all the power to give everything it prepared, so it can come and go, and it can leave its trace, and it can make me happen, and it is the only way it can make me happy.