flow

While browsing through magazines in the WHSmith bookstore in Paris ‒ for images that would make up an autobiographic collage ‒, I came across the one below.

I did not realize it at the time, because all I cared about was what was potentially inside the magazine ‒ images that evoked things that I cherished. Things like adventure, drawing, nature, travel, well-being, and the rest. But as I later found out, the cover itself summed up those more abstract themes that I cherished even more, in the same one line that appears at the top of every issue.

CELEBRATING CREATIVITY, IMPERFECTION AND LIFE'S LITTLE PLEASURES

I was in heaven.

It was only even later that I discovered that the title of the magazine bore the name of one of my favorite books of all-time.

The really funny thing is that the "flow" book ‒ in its presentation of an approach to achieving happiness by transforming life into a unified set of optimal experiences ‒ encourages the celebration of creativity, imperfection, and life's little pleasures.

Could it be a coincidence that both magazine and book are called "flow"?

I would like to think not.

P. S. The magazine did not disappoint ‒ it was chock-full of wonderful images. What I did not expect was that it had many other interesting things to look at, to read, to play with.