Flow resistance is creative tension.

Put your wine in the glass.

Think about chaos. Should the wine blow up, over, and out? Should it stay put? Aboard the ISS, it would dance about, unrestrained. The flow would be fluid unbound.

What if your pen behaved the same? The ink just ran, unprovoked.

Everyone has experienced the opposite — an expired, generic brand BIC pen that wont write — try as you may to “put an elephant” of pressure down to write, you are left with inkless canyons of letters carved into your page.

The wine stays in the glass. Gracefully held by a marriage of physics and form.

This is tension. Gravity would have the wine desire the earth, the earth desire the wine. The bulbous glass intervenes — standing in slight opposition to the force of attraction. In this tension, the wine is held — suspended — in time and space. Your glass is a tension-container, permitting otherwise impossible opportunities: pick it up, take a sip.

Taste the fruit of tension.

Wine, coffee, water, tea, juice… all the same: brought to your lips by the grace of tension.

If creativity is fluid, and we are the vessel, we should expect the same principles at play — a dance of opposition, flow, held-in-place, and flow again.

You are a vessel. You have a gift to offer, to nourish others. It is not your responsibility to drown them in the flow, but to hold your offering in grace, that when they come, they may drink.