Sky Nelson-Isaacs (LinkedIn | Twitter) never wants to stop discovering. Whether it’s in music, physics, speaking, or writing… he’s on a roll. His latest book, “Living in Flow: The Science of Synchronicity and How Your Choices Shape Your World” is all about the balance between passions and pursuits.
With all he’s got going in his life, we can’t help but feel like he’s the perfect person to write it.
He sat down with The Mission Daily to talk about “flow” – what it is, and how to achieve it.
Flow is a journey, not a destination. Sky tries to live out the message of his book in his daily life. “Every day is like an exploration for me to understand, ‘Well, what does flow really point to?’ And I think what’s beautiful about it is that it’s a never-ending investigation into who we are as human beings. As we get more into flow with life, it’s a never-ending exploration towards greater authenticity, and we never get to the bottom of authenticity. I think the more of our own baggage or conditioning we peel away, the more self-knowledge we gain, and the more we’re able to see our own reactions to things – we don’t necessarily react so fast. But that’s not the end, that’s the beginning, that’s the point from which we start really showing up in life the way we want to.”
Sky believes that this beginning is an exciting step. “Everything in life carries a sense of adventure or a sense of a worthwhile challenge. A big message in my book is that synchronicity as a process is not a positive process – it’s not something that happens in a positive way all the time – it’s a neutral process. So, a lot of experiences that show up that are synchronistic are difficult. And it’s really helpful to start seeing difficult experiences in the light of synchronicity, like, ‘How is this experience helping me grow in some way, or evolve?’ And from that perspective, I can feel like I’m dealing with a lot of challenges in my life at the same time I’m dealing with a lot of good stuff. And living in flow is a way of being able to hold both of those at the same time, in the context of growth. That makes me excited – I’ve got butterflies in my stomach half the day.”
There’s a story that comes to mind. I was making a move from a city that was in the North Bay, and my whole family was moving. It was kind of a big upheaval of our lives for a certain purpose, and all three of us had some kind of reason to want to do the move… but it was also difficult leaving our community, and moving to the East Bay. And in doing so, we had sold our home and were looking for a new house – and the East Bay market for housing is really, really tight, and really difficult to get into. So one of the things that I did is build what I call ‘symbolic momentum’ – this building momentum towards the experience I want to have, even if I don’t know how to get there – and trusting that every action I take in that direction builds some momentum. What we’re doing is moving along a tree: this tree represents all the different possibilities for how life can unfold, and as we move along that tree, we get closer to certain types of experiences. If we act towards something we want to experience, I believe it will happen. In this case, I was acting towards wanting to have a safe, comfortable, happy place to live with my family and make this move a success. I acted in alignment with that intention, and I had a trust that along that path, somewhere, some kind of synchronicity would show up which would show me what the next useful step would be. But I had to take a first step and get active. So I drove down to the Bay Area from where we were – a hour and a half away – and dropped my daughter off at my brothers birthday party (one of the reasons we moved down here is because we have family here), She was having a great time at the party and I said, ‘Well, this is great, but I’m going to go downtown for about an hour, and I’m going to pass out fliers.’
I had printed out fliers with our family’s description of why we’re moving to the East Bay, and a picture of us, also what we wanted in a house. We identified a neighborhood that we really liked – I didn’t need to live in that neighborhood – but I had to identify some place to start. So this was the neighborhood that my wife liked a lot, and I thought it would be a nice position. I went to that neighborhood. It’s four streets – each of them three or four blocks long, and I just walked that whole neighborhood and passed out fliers, and put them under porch mats. And in that process, I ended up meeting some folks on the street who wondered what I was doing, and thought I was a little odd, like, ‘You’re never going to find a house that way.’ I did end up finding one person who was moving and was interested in renting their house. Their daughter had the same name as my daughter and was the same age – she even had the same birthday. So there was this moment of like, ‘Oh, this is meant to be.’ In the end, I got really attached to that. I was like, ‘Oh, this is the house, this is the neighborhood we want, and their daughter’s got the same name.’ But then, we found out they were charging more than we wanted to spend. I tried to make it work – tried to fit my agenda onto this situation – but I had to listen to what was going on in the circumstance. It wasn’t working out. So, part of the first step in the process is to listen to the circumstance. The second step is to open your mind to see how what is showing up in life is or isn’t working, and may be different from your expectations. So I was able to let that go, and I was disappointed. I felt like, ‘God, this process should work, I should be able to find housing, and I put in a bunch of effort.’ And this future day, we were driving down to the Bay Area and we were going to go look at a number of houses for sale. We were kind of discouraged. On the way just before we got here, we decided to look at rentals. We had already signed my daughter up for a school, and one of the rentals on Craig’slist that day was a block away from the school. So we looked at it, and we both looked at each other in the car like, ‘Wait a minute.’”
They re-thought their plan. “We opened up to synchronicity and local connections. So the first house we went to, we changed our trajectory and went to the house. And that’s where we’ve been living for the past two years.”
It’s all part of the process, Sky says. “First, we listened to the circumstance where we had an agenda. We were going to buy a house, but maybe we had to listen. That wasn’t working, and here was an opportunity to rent. We had to open our minds to that possibility, and reflect on how this situation might actually benefit us. We had to reflect on the quality of our life six months down the road when we’re walking to school with our daughter. And ask – is that a good enough payoff for the drawback of not being able to buy a house? And once we reflected, then releasing the attachment of how we thought it was going to go, it worked. I thought we were going to buy a house and I almost passed up on the rental opportunity because I had an attachment.”
To listen to the rest of the interview, check out our podcast here.
